Business strategy & finance

Strategy tools

• SWOT: Strengths and Weaknesses (internal) versus Opportunities and Threats (external).
• Core competence: the distinctive strength a firm builds its strategy around.
• BPR (Business Process Re-engineering): radically redesigning a process rather than tweaking it.

Money sense

• ROI = profit ÷ investment — the return on an investment, usually as a percentage.
• Break-even point: the sales volume where total revenue equals total cost (no profit, no loss).
• Depreciation: spreading an asset's cost across its useful life instead of expensing it all at once.

Quality control — the seven QC tools

• Pareto chart: ranks causes so you spot the vital few behind most defects (the 80/20 idea).
• Control chart: tracks a process over time against upper/lower control limits.
• Cause-and-effect (fishbone) diagram, plus histogram, scatter diagram, check sheet, and stratification.