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The data-driven manufacturing system at this Chinese bespoke mens' suit manufacturer illustrates the use of information technology to support mass customization in a largely manual production environment. It contrasts sharply with some of the Industrie 4.0 automation-heavy approaches taken in some Western companies. Thus the case seeks to unpack the essence of a data-driven mass customization approach that is more suited to small and medium enterprises.

This case examines design choices in the construction of flow lines. Flow lines are a popular way of arranging production because they are simple and inherently efficient. Equipment or workstations are arranged according to the sequence of steps in which a product is made. Each step consists of a set of tasks that individually are minimum rational work elements. These are combined to form the work assignment associated with the step. The work follows the same sequence of operations as it moves down the line, and the sequence is fixed from batch to batch. The case setting is a production site in Hungary that is starting up the production of a personal beverage maker. Should the team implement a conveyor-paced line in preference to a manual pull system? An analysis of process steps and times gives students an opportunity to debate this question.

In today's global economy, what are the factors that go into production location choice? This case is set in the world's largest automotive glass producer as it expands from China into the United States. To meet a very aggressive cost target, management is faced with the alternatives of fulfilling the contract from its new Ohio factory, which can only produce above the target cost currently because it is still on a learning curve, or it can fulfill from its Tianjin, China factory which can produce below the cost target but will incur extensive shipping costs and require a far great amount of inventory holding. This case examines a core question facing managers who want to produce physical products for world markets.

This background note explains the structure of incentive-based sales compensation systems.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review Article. As "big data" becomes increasingly integrated into many aspects of our lives, we are hearing more calls for revolutionary changes in how researchers work. To save time in understanding the behavior of complex systems or in predicting outcomes, some analysts say it should now be possible to let the data "tell the story" rather than having to develop a hypothesis and go through painstaking steps to prove it. The success of companies such as Google Inc. and Facebook Inc., which have transformed the advertising and social media worlds by applying data mining and mathematics, has led many to believe that traditional methodologies based on models and theories may no longer be necessary. Among young professionals (and many MBA students), there is almost a blind faith that sophisticated algorithms can be used to explore huge databases and find interesting relationships independent of any theories or prior beliefs. The assumption is: The bigger the data, the more powerful the findings. As appealing as this viewpoint may be, authors Sen Chai and Willy Shih think it's misguided - and potentially risky for businesses that involve scientific research or technological innovation. For example, the data might appear to support a new drug design or a new scientific approach when there isn't actually a causal relationship. Although the authors acknowledge that data mining has enabled tremendous advances in business intelligence and in the understanding of consumer behavior - think of how Amazon.com Inc. figures out what you might want to buy, or how content recommendation engines such as those used by Netflix Inc. work - applying this approach to technical disciplines, they argue, is different. The authors studied several fields where massive amounts of data are available and collected:

The leader of a pioneering biotech company in the siRNA space weighs his options for scaling production capacity in advance of an anticipated commercial launch. Operational complexity and relative merits of in-house manufacturing versus a contractor model are discussed.

This spreadsheet supplement accompanies 617-010 United Airlines: More Out-and-Back Flying? and is intended to provide students with an opportunity to apply analysis concepts with real operational data.

The case looks at United Airlines when it is facing a decision on whether to shift its aircraft routing to more "out-and-back" routing in order to try to improve its on time performance. As one of the world's largest airlines, United had a very large fleet and hub-and-spoke network that provided passengers with a wide range of destination choices, but as with any complex system unless everything ran perfectly all the time, it inevitably faced cascading delays and missed passenger connection problems. While out-and-back routing tended to isolate operational issues, more traditional linear routings tended to offer high equipment utilization. The case offers students an opportunity to examine the effects of variability on different routing strategies.

This case describes the motivation for and the development of Siemens' digital manufacturing enterprise vision, which became the foundation for its implementation of Industrie 4.0. While the effort started with a purely defensive move by Anton Huber, head of the Digital Factory Division, to protect his core programmable logic controller business from the migration of value to software from hardware, the scope expanded radically as the company completed the acquisition of UGS. It was then able to articulate a complete roadmap from computer-aided product inception and design through simulation and automation system design all the way to the factory floor. The initial implementation at the Electronics Works Amberg became widely cited as the prototype for Industrie 4.0. The central question of the case is the importance of vertical integration to the delivery of the vision, in the face of pressure for open standards that will expose large parts of the system to competition and price pressure. How will Siemens earn a reasonable rate of return?

This case is set inside IBM Research's efforts to build a computer that can successfully take on human challengers playing the game show Jeopardy! It opens with the machine named Watson offering the incorrect answer "Toronto" to a seemingly simple question during the championship match. Was the answer a reflection of a strategic weakness, or was it actually consistent with design principles established by the development team? The case seeks to expand students' view of the product development process. Traditional software development projects begin with the gathering of requirements and analysis of the problem, and the writing of a detailed specification. The Jeopardy! problem is different-it requires a probabilistic approach where there is no closed form solution. Instead statistical patterns in the data are important and there is no obvious mapping to the way queries are expressed. Such problems are increasingly common in data mining, optimization problems, or Internet applications where the goal is to find an acceptably good solution in a short amount of time, when a deterministic approach might be less fruitful or impractical. We aspire for students to recognize that product development can take many forms, and that these are enabled by creativity and the right organizational flexibility and mindset. This abridged version of the case focuses on the choice of Jeopardy! as the development target, and the approach taken by the development team. The original case is HBS No. 612-017, and has much more detail on the design strategy for the Watson system.

Wang Jianlin, founder and Chairman of the Dalian Wanda Group (Wanda) kept close tabs on one of his flagship projects going up on the shores of the Yellow Sea. There construction was underway on Wanda Studios Qingdao, the largest film and production facility in the world. The studio was a key initiative of Wang, a central player in the country's rapidly growing movie business. Wanda was already the largest theatrical exhibitor in the world, but the studio represented an enormous bet on a less familiar part of the value network of the film industry. Its vertically-integrated approach was also quite different from the Hollywood of today, which has evolved to a much more specialized division of labor.

WeChat was developed by Tencent Holdings as a lightweight messaging platform. As it grew quickly to become the most popular messaging app in China, it added a range of products and services that sat on top that were designed to appeal to a broad range of consumers and businesses. Official accounts, WeChat payment, and online to offline features expanded its reach, but the core question was whether the company could break out from its home market and offer the rest of the world something that its competitors could not.

It took BJ Lee many years to learn how to navigate the patent minefield that was the global LED industry. When his company was first spun off from the Industrial Technology Research Institute in Taiwan, he thought the essence of a good IP strategy was to develop a technology portfolio that was different from everybody else. But in the ensuing two decades of competition and litigation, he came to appreciate some of the nuances that enabled his company to have freedom to practice. This case exposes that journey and some of the learnings.

When Dalian Wanda Group of China announced its plan to acquire the AMC Entertainment theatrical exhibition chain in the United States, many people in the U.S were mystified. Unlike China where theatrical exhibition was experiencing rapid growth, the U.S. market was viewed as mature, and rapidly changing technology was giving consumers a widening range of choices for movie viewing. AMC was owned by a group of private equity firms, and their pessimistic view of the industry influenced their strategies and investment decisions. AMC's management team had yet a different view on the prospects of the industry. Thus three present or potential stakeholders, all looking at the same data, had distinctly different views of future prospects. How could this be? The (B) case looks at AMC's performance in the year after the acquisition.

When Dalian Wanda Group of China announced its plan to acquire the AMC Entertainment theatrical exhibition chain in the United States, many people in the U.S were mystified. Unlike China where theatrical exhibition was experiencing rapid growth, the U.S. market was viewed as mature, and rapidly changing technology was giving consumers a widening range of choices for movie viewing. AMC was owned by a group of private equity firms, and their pessimistic view of the industry influenced their strategies and investment decisions. AMC's management team had yet a different view on the prospects of the industry. Thus three present or potential stakeholders, all looking at the same data, had distinctly different views of future prospects. How could this be? The (B) case looks at AMC's performance in the year after the acquisition.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Rising labor costs in China and other emerging economies, high supply chain and logistics costs, and wide differentials in energy costs in different parts of the world are provoking a fresh round of relocation of manufacturing and production. While some labor-intensive jobs are moving out of China to Southeast Asia or the next emerging low-cost regions, some manufacturing work is also returning to the United States. Wal-Mart is facilitating reshoring efforts among its suppliers, and consultants are offering reshoring conferences, reports and lots of advice. While the data on comparative labor and factor costs may be compelling, reshoring -bringing assembly work back from abroad -is hard work, notes author Willy C. Shih. This is especially true when needed resources (the supplier base, the workforce and even the company's own internal product design capabilities) have atrophied. Shih studied several initiatives aimed at rebuilding regional capacity in the United States (including at GE's Appliance Park in Kentucky and two Flextronics International plants in Texas) and other examples in Europe and Asia to identify lessons about what works. The benefits were no surprise. Placing manufacturing close to the market minimizes inventory in the pipeline, reduces delivery times and shortens ordering cycles. The challenges were less apparent: the need to stabilize the workforce, address skill gaps, rethink the capital/labor ratio, localize the supply base and rethink product design to leverage the proximity to manufacturing. In many ways, Shih writes, the challenges of reshoring to the United States are the challenges of reshoring in any market in the world. Managers must design supply chains for the production of goods that balance proximity to diverse markets with the locations of their capabilities and their supply ecosystems. Doing that well, Shih argues, will always be a source of competitive advantage.

Organizing speedy and efficient supply operations for unpredictable major natural disasters was a continuing challenge for the U.S. military, and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti was both unique in its operational scope and political complexity. As he reviewed the after-action reports, George Topic, the Vice Director of the Center for Joint and Strategic Logistics at the National Defense University wondered how the performance of disaster relief efforts should really be measured. How should the efficiency of the response be characterized? He wondered if they could overcome some of the hurdles to applying concepts from commercial supply chains. The case explores some of the lessons learned from the Haiti disaster, and offers an opportunity to test well-known supply chain concepts.

Reed Hastings founded Netflix to provide a home movie service that would do a better job satisfying customers than the traditional retail rental model. But as it encountered challenges it underwent several major strategy shifts, ultimately developing a business model and an operational strategy that were highly disruptive to retail video rental chains. The combination of a large national inventory, a recommendation system that drove viewership across a broad catalog, and a large customer base made Netflix a force to be reckoned with, especially as a distribution channel for lower-profile and independent films. Blockbuster, the nation's largest retail video rental firm, was initially slow to respond, but ultimately rolled out a hybrid retail/online response in the form of Blockbuster Online. Aggressive pricing pulled in subscribers, but at a price to both it and Netflix. But a new challenge was on the horizon - the rapid growth of the company's online streaming service, which had a very different business model. Hastings' efforts to separate the activity into two separate companies met with strong pushback from consumers and the press. What was the best path forward?

The American Airlines in 2011 case was developed to provide a setting for the comparative analysis of two very different business models in the U.S. domestic airline industry-the network carrier and the low cost carrier (LCC). These models offer very different value propositions. Firms allocate resources into distinctively different processes, and they earn returns using parallel but different profit models. Yet while most scholars view the LCC model as disruptive, the two different models have been able to co-exist for over forty years, albeit with substantial evolution. By unpacking how one of the major network carriers was able to evolve its model successfully for such a long time before industry structural changes necessitated a radical overhaul, the cases seek to give students insights into how the different business models were established, how competitive forces have driven their evolution, and the importance of constantly evolving and tuning a firm's model.

This case is a supplement to 614-072, which examines the early history of the color television receiver market, and the global consequences of an historic 1958 consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice that opened RCA's patents to licensing by domestic competitors royalty-free. This externality had a dramatic impact on the long-term health of the U.S. consumer electronics industry.