This unit provides an understanding of the nature and purpose of business. It discusses why businesses formally identify their mission and why they set objectives relating to profit, growth, survival, cash-flow, society and ethics. It exams the measurement of profit, including explanations of revenue, fixed costs, variable costs and total costs.

This unit then looks at different business forms, including sole traders, partnership, private & public limited companies. Consideration is given to ordinary share capital, market capitalisation & dividends, as well as shareholders & why they invest, & the influences on share price & the significance of share price changes.

This unit concludes by look at how changes in the external environment affect business costs and the demand for good and services. Factors considered include: competition, incomes, interest rates, demographic factors, and environmental issues and fair trade.

This unit explains what managers do, including setting objectives, analysing, leading, making decisions and reviewing. It considers types of management and leadership styles and the theories behind them, including the Tannenbaum Schmidt continuum and Blake Mouton grid. 

This unit then looks at the value of scientific decision making and intuition. The role of risks, rewards, uncertainly and opportunity cost in decision making is considered, with an evaluation of the use and value of decision trees in decision making. An analysis of influences on decision making, including a consideration of mission, objectives, ethics, the external environment and resource constraints, is considered.

The unit concludes by highlighting why an organisation should take into account stakeholders' needs when making decisions, and how stakeholder relationships can be managed.  

This unit outlines the purpose of marketing & examines the marketing objectives set by firms. The value of market research is introduced & comparisons are made between primary & secondary market research & between qualitative & quantitative research data. It examines how marketing data is interpreted, looking at confidence intervals & considering the use of both correlation & extrapolation in the analysis of marketing data. Detailed explanations of the concepts of price & income elasticity of demand are given and their value to businesses explained.

The unit then looks at the process of segmentation, targeting and positioning, including methods such as demographic, geographic, income and behavioural. It also considers the influences on choosing a target market and market positioning, including a discussion of niche and mass marketing.

This unit concludes by considering the factors that influence the 7Ps of a firm's marketing mix. It examines the importance of an integrated marketing mix, with specific study of the value of digital marketing and e-commerce.

This unit introduces operational management and examines the value of operational objectives and decisions. It will show how measurable operational objectives can be calculated and how the results of these calculations can be interpreted. It investigates labour productivity and efficiency - how they can be increased and the difficulties involved in doing so. The importance of capacity and capacity utilisation is considered, as well as the benefits and difficulties of lean production.

The unit then examines the importance of quality to a business and considers methods of improving quality, such as quality assurance. The benefits and difficulties of improving quality are analysed before assessing the consequences of poor quality.

This unit concludes by examining ways of improving flexibility, speed of response and dependability. It then considers the management of supply in order to match demand, focusing in particular on the value of outsourcing and exploring the factors that influence the amount of inventory held by a business. It looks at influences on the choice of suppliers and the value of effective and efficient management of the supply chain.

This unit introduces the financial objectives and concepts of return on investment, debt, capital expenditure and capital structure. The distinction between cash flow and profit and between gross profit, operating profit and profit for year are explained, followed by a discussion of revenue, costs and profit objectives and cash flow objectives.

This unit then considers how to construct and analyse budgets, cash flow forecasts, and break-even. It then introduced the concept of profitability and how to analyse it using ratio analysis.

This unit concludes by making a distinction between internal and external sources of finance, and short-term and long-term financing. It focuses on debt factoring, overdrafts, retained profits, share capital, loans and venture capital.

This unit considers employee engagement, talent development, training, diversity and alignment of values. Soft and hard human resource management approaches are examined. It considers labour turnover and retention rates, labour productivity and labour costs per unit, and employee costs as a percentage of turnover.

This unit then considers job design, including an explanation of the Hackman and Oldham model. It looks at authority, span, hierarchy, delegation, centralisation & decentralisation being core to decisions about organisational design. Human resource planning, recruitment, training, redeployment and redundancy are considered in turn.

This unit concludes by identifying the benefits of having motivated & engaged employees with consideration of theories by Taylor, Maslow & Herzberg. Both financial & non-financial methods of motivation are considered. How to improve employer-employee relations, with consideration of trade unions & work councils, is discussed.