Baolong Automotive: Can It Sustain Growth?

H. Brian Hwarng, Xuchuan Yuan

Product #:W50746

Supplier:Ivey/NUS

Discipline:Entrepreneurship, General Management

Setting:China, 2024

Details:Case (PDF) • 20 pages • 2026-08-28

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In October 2024, Shanghai Baolong Automotive Corporation (Baolong) faced a critical escalation: During pre–mass production testing of its electronically controlled air suspension, a top-tier automaker detected an unacceptable abnormal noise. With a vehicle launch at stake and others potentially affected, Baolong sent a cross-functional task force to the customer site. After nearly two weeks, leaders weighed two paths: a short-term containment fix (tighter supplier controls and design tweaks) to meet schedule, or a fundamental design change requiring longer validation to remove the root cause. Set against Baolong’s lean growth and the Baolong Production System rollout since 2008, the decision highlighted speed versus quality trade-offs, uneven lean maturity, capability transfer challenges, and the need to align digital transformation.

Learning Objectives

The case can be used in undergraduate, graduate, and executive programs within courses covering operations strategy (operations as competitive advantage), lean transformation and sustaining continuous improvement, quality management under launch pressure, scaling an operating system across BUs, geographies, and ventures, and digital transformation as an enabler (not a substitute) for operational excellence. After completing this case, students will be able to do the following:

Investigate the influence of lean capabilities on Baolong’s development (BPS, Plan-Do-Study-Act [PDSA], Jidoka escalation, Hoshin Kanri, lean model lines, continuous-improvement culture).
Analyze operational excellence via five elements—purpose, principles, management systems, technical systems, and technology—and assess how their alignment (or misalignment) affects Baolong’s growth.
Discover how Baolong replicated lean-transformation achievements across new businesses and operations (TPMS to ECAS, China to overseas, joint ventures and new venture ramp-up).
Identify challenges in the EV and autonomous era and beyond (compressed cycles, platform quality, supplier capability, talent, digitalization rollout, multi-site governance, reputation risk).