MAN4504 – Operational Decision Making is a 3-credit, 45-contact-hour senior-level course in operations management, taught from the perspective of the manager who must decide rather than the analyst who models. It applies quantitative methods to the recurring operational problems of an organization: how much to produce, how much inventory to hold, how to schedule work, where to locate capacity, and how to improve a process that is not performing.
The course covers forecasting — moving averages, exponential smoothing, trend and seasonality, and measuring forecast error; quality management — total quality management, statistical process control, control charts, and process capability; inventory management — economic order quantity, reorder points, safety stock, and just-in-time; process and workflow design — capacity analysis, bottleneck identification, and line balancing; waiting line (queuing) analysis; and project management — work breakdown, network diagrams, and critical path method.
Underneath the techniques sits a consistent theme: operational decisions involve tradeoffs that can be quantified, and a manager who can quantify them makes better decisions than one working on intuition. Holding more inventory raises carrying cost but lowers stockout risk; adding capacity reduces waiting time but costs money. The course teaches students to find the balance rather than assert it.
It is a quantitative course. STA2023 (statistics) is the common prerequisite, and the work involves calculation, spreadsheet modeling, and interpretation of results.
Offered at approximately 20 Florida institutions, spanning state colleges awarding business bachelor's degrees (Broward, Daytona State, Eastern Florida State, Florida Gateway, Florida State College at Jacksonville, Indian River State, North Florida, Palm Beach State, Pensacola State, St. Johns River, Seminole State, Valencia, College of the Florida Keys) and universities including FAMU, FAU, UF, and USF.
Florida employers include the logistics corridor around Jacksonville's port and Central Florida's distribution centers, aerospace and defense manufacturing on the Space Coast and at Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and L3Harris, hospitality operations at Disney and Universal, cruise line operations out of Miami and Port Canaveral, and healthcare systems applying operations methods to capacity and patient flow.
The course also supports the PMP and CAPM project management credentials, the CPIM and CSCP from ASCM, and Six Sigma belt certifications.
Prerequisites vary; verify locally. STA2023 (statistics) is the common requirement — Seminole State lists it explicitly — because forecasting, control charts, and queuing all depend on statistical concepts. Many institutions also require junior or senior standing and, at university business schools, admission to the college of business. Some programs list MAN3025 (Principles of Management) as a prerequisite.
Where MAN3025 Principles of Management surveys the management function broadly and qualitatively, this course takes the operations portion and makes it quantitative. Students who found MAN3025 comfortable because it rewarded verbal reasoning sometimes struggle here, where the same topics require calculation. The two are complementary rather than sequential in content, though many programs sequence MAN3025 first.
Local titles include Operational Decision Making, Operations Management, and Production and Operations Management. Under SCNS the same number at the same level is equivalent regardless of title.
This is typically a senior-level course in a B.A.S. or B.S. business program, often taken near the capstone. Because it integrates forecasting, quality, inventory, and project methods, it works well as preparation for a capstone simulation or consulting project.
The difficulty is arithmetic volume rather than conceptual depth. Each topic has its own formula set, and students who work problems consistently do well while those who read the text without calculating do not. Plan 6–8 hours per week outside class, and learn to build the models in Excel rather than by hand — both because it is faster and because it is what the job actually looks like.
Operations management is a domain where AI and analytics tools have moved from novelty to standard practice, and where the boundary between useful automation and misplaced trust is unusually clear.
Where AI helps. Demand forecasting is among the most mature commercial applications of machine learning, and modern forecasting systems routinely outperform the classical time-series methods this course teaches, particularly with many products and irregular demand. Optimization and scheduling solvers handle problems far beyond hand calculation. Language models are useful for explaining a method, generating and debugging Excel or Solver models, and drafting the interpretation section of an analysis.
Where it fails. Language models are unreliable at multi-step arithmetic — they will produce a confidently wrong EOQ or critical path. More importantly for a manager, forecasting and optimization models fail silently when conditions change: a demand model trained on historical data does not anticipate a hurricane, a supply disruption, or a competitor's entry, and an optimization model produces a precise answer to whatever question was actually encoded, which may not be the question that matters. The classical methods in this course are worth learning partly because they make the assumptions visible.
The manager's responsibility. Operational decisions have consequences — stockouts, idle capacity, missed deadlines — and accountability rests with the decision-maker, not the model. A manager who cannot sanity-check a forecast or recognize that an optimization result is implausible cannot supervise the systems producing them. That judgment is precisely what this course builds.
Academic integrity. Institutional and instructor policies govern and vary. The defensible principle: AI is appropriate for understanding methods and for building models on permitted work, and inappropriate as a substitute for the quantitative reasoning being assessed. Exams in this course are typically closed-resource, because the ability to work a problem unaided is what demonstrates that the underlying logic is understood.
Generated August 31, 2026 · Updated August 31, 2026