Free online courseOperations Management Course: Strategy, Planning, Quality and Inventory

Course Description

Build practical operations leadership skills with this free online course in business and marketing for aspiring entrepreneurs and managers. It connects strategy with day-to-day execution, showing how strong operations decisions shape customer value, cost, speed, and reliability across products and services.

Start with core operations concepts and move into operations strategy, product life cycle thinking, value engineering, design for manufacturability, and ergonomic considerations. You will also explore rapid prototyping and forecasting approaches, learning how demand insights guide smarter planning and reduce uncertainty.

Strengthen your ability to design efficient systems through facility planning, plant location analysis, layout decisions, and material flow. Then develop solid planning and control capabilities, including production planning, process planning, aggregate planning, and capacity planning to balance resources with market needs.

Project scheduling is covered in depth with network diagrams, critical path method, PERT, and time-cost trade-offs, helping you plan timelines and manage constraints with confidence. Quality management is also addressed through foundational quality concepts, total quality management, total productive maintenance, statistical quality control, and Six Sigma for continuous improvement.

Finally, learn materials and inventory management essentials, including inventory control policies, EOQ and production quantity models, just in time practices, kanban systems, MRP, and ERP. By the end, you will have a clear, end-to-end view of how to plan, improve, and scale operations in real organizations.