BACHELOR OF BUSINESS

Unit Description

Accounting is the process of identifying, measuring and communicating information about business activity for decision-making. This introductory unit provides an overview of business and the business environment and introduces the principles supporting the use of an accounting information system for business decision making in a socially responsible manner. The unit covers the relevance and significance of fundamental accounting conventions and addresses applications of the accounting information system from the perspective of a user. On completion of this unit, students should have a clear understanding of the role of financial accounting within a business organisation and how financial accounting helps managers meet business objectives. Students will be able to communicate with accounting professionals, understand the relevance of accounting information for informed decision-making by a wide range of potential users, and have the ability to analyse and interpret accounting information, including to analyse ethical and socially responsible business activity.

Unit Description

This unit equips students with basic business and academic writing and presentation skills necessary for completing their course of study and for entry-level word ready business positions. The ability to develop documents relevant for business studies, and write well-researched and solidly-structured arguments in a clear, concise, and factual manner is emphasised. Additionally, this Unit explores the types of interpersonal and group communication skills relevant to the business workplace. This includes developing in students an understanding of and ability to utilise fundamentals of negotiation, including evidence-based arguments and utilise these skills for professional communication, presentations and well-written business relevant documents. Ethical and socially responsible considerations in negotiation, business communication, and academic writing, including avoiding plagiarism and ensuring academic integrity such as correct citing and referencing practices, are threaded throughout the Unit.

Unit Description

This unit presents the foundations and core principles of marketing for businesses including an appreciation of marketing concepts utilised by businesses in Australian and globally. Emphasis is placed on creating customer value through different marketing activities and strategies, understanding the marketing mix within an environment of change, maximising utility of limited resources amidst industries in constant flux, and exploring new methodologies used by marketing practices. Responsible and ethical marketing is crucial to sustainable and productive, long-term relationships between organisations, their customers and stakeholders. This unit includes careful consideration of ethical and socially responsible practices within marketing activities. In addition, students will be introduced to current topics including the marketing process in an increasingly digital and global environment.

Unit Description

Students will study legal knowledge and related problem-solving skills appropriate to business through the three main sources of modern Australian law: The Common Law, Equity, and Statute Law. The unit also examines some of the problems that are created by the existence of nine distinct legislative, judicial and executive systems in Australia, and briefly touches on the mechanisms that exist to minimise these problems and to resolve conflicts between the systems. The unit includes understanding the common law of contract (including outsourcing) and various statutory provisions that have, over time, been introduced to modify those common law principles to promote fair trading and consumer protection. Students also learn the application of these concepts to the business environment, ethical and socially responsible perspectives including how the law applies to setting up a business, consumer law, competition law as well as consumer rights and responsibilities in Australia. In addition, various avenues of legal assistance to businesses in Australia are explored.

Unit Description

This unit provides an overview of Business Information Systems (BIS), its role in organisations and contribution to business decision-making processes. The unit explains how technology is used to develop BIS that effectively support, enable and add value to business processes. An understanding of BIS is important to the work of managers because it serves as a bridge between management and technology in the business’ operations. Mastering both business and technology skills and knowledge create job opportunities, since individuals with these abilities can better contribute to shaping a company’s strategy and value operations. Upon completion of this unit, students will be able to understand the BIS concepts, analyse and evaluate issues contained in BIS case studies, appreciate and analyse the impact of BIS on business decision-making, and utilise BIS in creating business value and competitive advantages.

Unit Description

The unit equips students with the basic principles, fundamental practices and techniques required for effective organisational management. The principles of management presented are premised on four basic functions: planning, organising, influencing/leading and controlling. The unit overviews topics such as organisational culture, decision-making, motivation, managing diversity, and styles of personal management. The topics are then expanded to include human behaviour in organisations with a specific focus on the workplace. The unit examines the ways in which an understanding of organisational behaviour is necessary to, and facilitates the management of, people at work. Emphasis is placed on identifying internal and external environmental influences on organisational and individual performance and the role of the manager as well as developing an ethical and socially responsible managerial philosophy.

Unit Description

This unit aims to provide students with a basic understanding of the principles and practical skills necessary for the application of statistics in the business context. The unit emphasises the use of statistical methods to draw inferences from sample data to inform decision-making across business generally and more particularly in the areas of economics, accountancy, finance, and marketing. Topics covered in the unit include descriptive statistics, random variables and their distributions, sampling distributions, point and interval estimation of parameters, hypothesis testing, and regression models. Students are also introduced to the ever-increasing importance of Big Data for the operation and decision-making purposes of businesses as well ethical and social implications of Big Data. Students learn to organise and present data as well as solve statistical problems using Excel. This unit complements the study of other units and provides a foundation for further study of statistical methods.

Unit Description

This unit introduces an understanding of economic concepts and contemporary economic issues for analyses and arguments in business decision-making. The unit focuses on the role of the market system and how resources are allocated; understanding consumers and businesses and how they interact; analysing and evaluating issues using economic theory in case studies; the relevance of economic theory to business decision-making, and examining the role of government in the economy. Microeconomics examines questions of price determination and resource allocation including ethical and social decisions and considers how firms take relative prices into account in their decision-making. Macroeconomics is the study of the economy in aggregate and considers the key determinants of the level of economic activity, such as the impact of interest rates, exchange rates, and the role impact of government policies on overall economic activity. The importance and interconnectedness of globalisation, international trade, and economic growth related to SMEs growth will be considered.

Prerequisites

BUS101 Fundamentals of Accounting

Unit Description

Accounting is the process of identifying, measuring and communicating information about business activity for decision-making by the users of the information. This unit continues on from BUS101Fundamentals of Accounting, and concentrates on the application of management accounting as part of business reporting and strategic management. Management accounting is a vital part of business decision-making and the basis of many internal business reports to management and to boards of directors. On completion of this Unit, students should have a clear understanding of the role of management accounting (and its limitations) and the way management accounting and reporting facilitates business decision-making, including analysing and interpreting management accounting data. Students will be able to understand issues such as budgeting, cost behaviour and capital investment decisions, to apply accounting knowledge to contemporary business problems and performance measurement.

Prerequisites

BUS106 Fundamentals of Management

Unit Description

This unit equips students to understand the significance of business models and explore the connections with business strategy, innovation and disruption management, digital technology and economic theory. Students have an opportunity to develop practical competencies and skills necessary for designing business models. A key learning objective of this unit is to give students a fuller understanding of the contemporary business environment, and in particular, how business modelling, competitive intelligence and scenario analyses align with the strategic planning and decision-making processes that influence the performance of either a ‘for-profit or ‘not-for-profit’ organisation. The Unit’s material also includes an analysis of how digital technology is shaping opportunities for “Startup businesses”, and challenging traditional Small & Medium Enterprises (SME) and Social Enterprises business models, in the context of a dynamic, competitive and technologically-involved competitive global environment. Students should be able to contribute to a creative, socially sustainable business model design and planning process for a business organisation.

Prerequisites

BUS107 Applied Statistics

Unit Description

This unit introduces students to business research problems and the ways business research is conducted. Emphasis is placed on providing students with an understanding of the research process and a working knowledge of the methods and issues involved in conducting business research that allows better decision- making, both quantitative and qualitative. Students will gain an understanding of relevant approaches and factors to consider when undertaking research to provide insights to solving a relevant business problem. Students should develop critical core competencies and skills required to undertake this research, including: defining research questions; setting appropriate research objectives; design that incorporates research objectives and budgetary constraints; secondary and primary data collection and instruments; sampling and analysis methods; and effective reporting of results; as well as the importance of ethical conduct in conducting research in business contexts. The unit culminates in students writing a Research Proposal that requires students to identify, discuss and formulate a research problem, select and apply appropriate research approaches and methods of inquiry (both quantitative or qualitative).

Prerequisites

BUS105 Business Information Systems

Unit Description

The increasing dominance of technology companies in the Fortune 500 warrants critical analysis and dissection of “technology” and “tech” businesses. This unit examines the full scope of technology’s role and meaning in business contexts, from low-tech to high-tech, legacy to emerging, front-end to back-end, process innovation to intellectual property. Students will audit the range of technology used in a real-world business and assess its “digital maturity” according to different criteria. This Unit will allow students to compare and contrast a variety of digital maturity models, as well as applications of technology in business to demonstrate the spectrum of digital maturity, as well as ethical and social implications across organisations and communities. This unit seeks to develop students’ organisational technology literacies and their capacity to work effectively and add value to businesses using digital transformation.

Prerequisites

BUS106 Fundamentals of Management

Unit Description

Operations management (OM) focuses on the planning, design, scheduling and delivery of goods and services in an efficient and effective way. It is one of the core functions as OM performs a vital function in meeting business goals and driving innovation through identifying and developing improvements in business processes. This unit will provide an overview of OM and consequently focuses on how OM is involved in developing and managing value-adding processes and supporting these processes through various tools, techniques and methods. This includes developing a critical understanding of operational processes, their relationship with supply chain management, and how operations management contributes to developing and maintaining organisational competitive advantage. Upon completion, students will be familiar with major OM processes and be able to analyse related issues in business organisations, apply the relevant language, concepts and tools to deal with these issues in order to gain competitive advantage through OM.

Prerequisites

BUS107 Applied Statistics

Unit Description

This unit deals with understanding data and how to analyse and present data in real-world scenarios. The unit gives students the opportunity to investigate and reflect on the data held about consumers and businesses by big data companies of the world such as Facebook and Google. Students also learn to assess datasets which have been collected by governments, including the purpose and quality of data. Data is not objective and neutral; students will learn to evaluate the integrity of datasets, understanding that this is the basis for good practice in data analytics. Students will also learn to use and critically assess a range of data analytics and visualisation tools to collaboratively interpret and articulate data including assessing the ethical and social dimensions of data collected by companies.

Prerequisites

BUS101 Fundamentals of Accounting

Unit Description

Applied Business Finance teaches students analytical techniques of business financial management and planning. The focus is on the concepts and techniques required to make sound business financial decisions including socially responsible considerations, balancing micro- and macro-financial considerations to develop a balanced perspective on risk and opportunity. Topics include: an overview of financial markets, time value of money, valuation of securities, risk and return, capital budgeting decisions and financing decisions. Attention is given to analysing and evaluating business challenges from an applied finance perspective; understanding the relevance of financial measures to business; and providing a financial capital perspective on business risks and rewards. BUS208 develops conceptual frameworks and specialised tools for solving company financial problems. Illustrations from corporate practices are used to highlight the importance and relevance of applied finance to business-level objective.

Prerequisites

BUS106 Fundamentals of Management

Unit Description

The unit addresses the challenges of project management, alongside an evaluation of processes and tools required for succeeding when project managing. It offers a strategic view, as well as practical tools to better manage projects and how products and services create value. Throughout the unit, emphasis is placed on taking a managerial, ethical, and social view of the business and organisational context and implementing tools to support decision-making. The Unit highlights how project management performs a vital function in meeting business goals and driving innovation through identifying and developing improvements in business processes.

Prerequisites

BUS202 Models for Business

Unit Description

This advanced unit capitalises on prior learning regarding management and planning through deeper evaluation of organisational strategy elements. The unit addresses the key parameters of strategic management, including the evaluation of the organisation’s internal and external environments, the formulation of basic organisational missions, purposes, and objectives. Further attention is given to the development of policies and strategies to achieve them including leadership styles which may influence change management, the efficient execution of implementation processes that result in the achievement of organisational objectives and achievement and retention of competitive advantage with respect to competitors. The unit focuses on: developing an enhanced understanding of sustainable competitive advantage of organisations; links between the external and internal environments of an organisation; how these links impact on strategy formulation and implementation; and communicating to others the importance of issues relating to business strategy.

Prerequisites

BUS104 Fundamentals of Business Law

Unit Description

Contemporary organisations are frequently exposed to complex layers of intangible risks. The scope of risk management is now expanding beyond maintaining a balance sheet to promoting ethical leadership and values-based decision making. The complexity, fluidity and changing nature of risk is discussed, as well as the need of multi-stakeholder engagement and continuous monitoring and review. Risk management and ethics is positioned as a core strategic function of enterprises for ensuring business and enterprise sustainability. This unit also evaluates frameworks and techniques for categorising, analysing and planning for risk and their application to situations faced by businesses in a range of industry sectors. Approaches to generating an insightful understanding of the business context and environment are explored, and appropriate techniques to analyse diverse types of risk are applied. Students are challenged through discussions, hypotheticals and scenario analyses, to learn about common levels of risk awareness, codes of conduct, and value systems.

Prerequisites

BUS104 Fundamentals of Business Law

Unit Description

This unit addresses the two inter-related areas that challenge all organisations: ethics and governance. Students critically assess the purpose, roles and responsibilities of management, boards and employees with respect to the lawful, ethical and responsible conduct of a business entity; and the notion of corporate social responsibility as a philosophical and strategic framework for corporate governance and organisational management. Students critically evaluate contestable issues relating to how businesses operate, and the role of boards, managers and employees in ensuring fair, honest, compliant and appropriate dealings with all stakeholders. A range of ethical issues including marketing, advertising, human resource management and finance in organisational management will be examined. Students will appreciate the relevance of ethical thinking and sound governance practices to organisational plans and problems; the ability to identify the linkages between specific ethical and governance issues and organisational objectives and strategies; communicating to others the importance of issues relating to ethical and responsible management in organisations for long-term business sustainability.

Prerequisites

BUS202 Models for Business

Unit Description

This unit introduces students to the entrepreneurial process and to aspects of management that are of importance to entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs. The qualities and skills needed to be a successful intrapreneur and entrepreneur are examined including being socially responsible. The unit aims to introduce students to entrepreneurship through activities and assessments that require them to think like entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs. Topics covered include entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship concepts and theories; creativity and innovation; discovery, evaluation and creation of entrepreneurial opportunities; commercialisation of innovation; intellectual property; ethics and social responsibilities of entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs; entrepreneurial marketing, finance, resource management, and leadership; developing a sustainable business plan and performance measurement for a new start-up venture and for a new business within an existing organisation.

Prerequisites

BUS202 Models for Business

Unit Description

Information and communications technology (ICT) have transformed organisations by generating new Digital Business aspects, initiating new ways of working together, providing new means of interfacing with suppliers and customers, as well as creating new methods of managing the organisation as a whole. This unit addresses how businesses can succeed using Digital Business means within the constant advancement of technologies and their pervasiveness in the industry. Consequently, in this unit, the Digital Business topics are relevant to most existing businesses in Australia and globally, and equips students with the skills and analytical foundation to apply to businesses competitive success and advantage in a technological environment. Students will be taught core aspects of Digital Business including eCommerce, cyber security, digital IMC, Supply Chain 2.0, as well as business models relevant to a digital environment, eCommunication tools and methods for managing virtual teams.

Prerequisites

BUS202 Models for Business

Unit Description

This unit gives students a critical appreciation of the complex contemporary business environment in which international business operates. Student learn how businesses can formulate appropriate organisational and marketing strategies, and evaluate foreign market entry strategies (including exporting, joint ventures and alliances, foreign direct investment/ wholly-owned subsidiaries. Emphasis will be placed on changes in the global environment and the need for international strategic engagement in the changing environments in Asia, Europe, USA, Africa, and South America. Changes in the world social and economic environment are creating new opportunities and challenges for Australian businesses. This unit leadership, strategy, corporate social implications and alliance management internationally. Challenges of strategic alliances and partnerships will be rigorously examined. The unit’s presenters and interactive discussions aim to demonstrate how global competition and challenges of managing across cultures can influence and shape business opportunities and collaboration for alliances that can be leveraged by businesses interested in and or engaged in international operations and expansion.

Prerequisites

BUS303 Performance and Risk Management

Unit Description

The unit explores how small enterprises with limited resources could successfully create ‘value first’, targeted at underserved market segments, and eventually capture larger market segments that are traditionally served by the more established companies. This is a process whereby a smaller company with fewer resources could successfully challenge established incumbent businesses. Students will critically assess the disruptive innovation processes, building on their knowledge of business models to gain insights into how new entrants create new ways of doing business. Specifically, as incumbents focus on improving their products and services for their most demanding (and usually most profitable) customers, they exceed the needs of some segments and ignore the needs of others. Fringe ideas can redefine entire markets resulting in where how new businesses emerge and mature companies fall. Key performance indicators are utilised for achieving strategic and socially sustainable frameworks for new ventures within contemporary global economic, social, mutual and not-for-profit sectors.

*This unit is to be taken at the final semester of study

Unit Description

This Business Capstone aims to consolidate, integrate and apply knowledge and skills that have been learned in previous units, in a more in-depth professional manner. Students gain transferable skills with research application including presentation, report writing and team-working collaborative skills. Students produce submissions to industry representatives, professional bodies or the wider academic community through a formal presentation allowing students to make decisions utilising risk assessment frameworks, where ethical and sustainability issues are also incorporated, to give students valuable experience of the practical aspects of management and strategy generation, highlighting how various business disciplines contribute to their professional knowledge and skills. The unit is conducted through a series of modules over one semester, and the modules are designed to enable student to scaffold their previously accumulated concepts for more applied learning to produce work-ready professional business students.