When L.C. Tu receives an emergency order, he is confronted with a range of production scheduling choices, each of which has unique costs and trade-offs. The case was designed to help students understand job-shop style production and the impact of disruptions and reactive scheduling. Students use two of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's mainstream processes as a vehicle for analysis. The case describes a real situation in which upper management accepts an emergency order. By working through the impact on the production system, students should develop a feel for how shifting demand in a large factory that is structured as a job shop alters the demands on, and utilization rates of expensive capital equipment in a complex way. As bottlenecks shift, students can explore several alternatives, each with different costs and trade-offs. Students may also reflect on the true cost of providing the extraordinary service, and whether management properly takes the impact on operations into account when it makes customer commitments.

Develop its own branded line, or continue as an original design manufacturer (ODM)? Tung Lung Metal Industries Co. Ltd. is a Taiwanese maker of door lock hardware that is faced with the question of whether to continue to focus on its ODM business or start placing more emphasis on its own brand development and growth in global markets. The case explores the bumpy history of the company and raises questions around the downstream consequences of global outsourcing strategies.

Well-codified interfaces have enabled horizontal specialization in the global semiconductor industry. This Technical Note describes the modern integrated circuit value chain, and the motivation for the reuse of blocks of intellectual property in modern IC designs. It briefly examines ARM Limited as an example of an IP specialist supplier, and looks at the evolution to complete Systems-on-Chip and Systems-in-Packages so that students may examine the evolution of industry structure in the accompanying case System-on-a-Chip 2008: Global Unichip Corporation.

ASUSTek Computer was the world's largest manufacture of PC motherboards, yet when it tried to launch its new sub-notebook Eee PC, the organization faced challenges in doing things outside of its established processes. Though many of the team members had worked together for years, they had to find new ways of working as they tried to launch the new mobile Internet device category without undermining its existing notebook PC business.

Chi Mei is a Taiwanese industrial group that makes a major diversification into the technology intensive TFT-LCD flat panel display industry. Because the diversification is far away from its core competence in petrochemicals, it is an opportunity to examine how the firm was able to become a global leader in the relatively short span of ten years. Such organic diversifications are relatively unusual by Western standards, especially into technologies and markets that have relatively high entry barriers and where there is no deep rooted national technological or scientific foundation. As such Chi Mei is an interesting vehicle to examine the rise of a major Asian industrial cluster with global scope which has no participants or competitors in the West. The case can also be used to expose students to the global supply chain for key information technology components. Taiwan and Korea are today the major world centers for the manufacture of semiconductors (in particular DRAMs and FLASH memory) and flat panel displays. Taiwan is also the center for notebook computer manufacturing, and Taiwanese companies, through their China-based manufacturing and assembly operations, drive 60% of the IT exports from China. Yet few students even know the identity of these major global players. Taiwan and Korea based TFT-LCD flat panels are the critical components in notebook computers, computer monitors, and flat panel televisions from essentially all well known global brands.