The encyclopedia · Engineering & Operations · Operational decision · 2021–2025
HD Hyundai's CEO cut Volvo lead times 3 months to 3 weeks; now he's rebuilding Ulsan
Choi's daily settlement, process schedules and line rationalization became HD Hyundai's template to reach global top 5.
HD Hyundai Construction Equipment
The solution
HD Hyundai Construction Equipment's CEO Choi is a veteran of Korea's construction machinery industry, trained from a production-floor start at Samsung Heavy Industries in 1977 and later at Volvo Construction Equipment and Doosan Infracore. Wherever he went, he introduced the same toolkit: daily settlement, process schedules, and production-line rationalization.
At Volvo Construction Equipment the results were dramatic: order-to-delivery fell from three months to three weeks, and the company's European market share rose from 4% to 14%. HD Hyundai chairman Kwon Oh-gap recruited him in 2021 as head of global factory innovation and later made him CEO, with the explicit instruction to lead production innovation.
Within a month at HD Hyundai he approved a 200 billion won investment in the Ulsan plant, judged less productive than Doosan's Incheon plant. The rebuilt Ulsan campus—a smart factory with unified production and logistics lines, real-time product tracking, welding robots and AI quality inspection—was planned to lift labor productivity about 20%, cut product completion time about 35%, and raise annual capacity from 9,600 to 15,000 excavators and wheel loaders.
Why it worked
- Daily settlement forces costs and output to be visible and acted on every single day
- Process schedules convert a vague goal into a tracked, dated plan across the plant
- Line rationalization attacks the fixed-cost structure that scale alone cannot fix
- The same playbook had proven results at Volvo, giving the Ulsan rebuild a tested template
- Aging demographics made automation the long-term answer to factory labor scarcity
What can be applied
A leader who makes cost and schedule visible daily can transplant the same discipline across companies—first fix the routine, then the plant.
Aftermath
HD Hyundai Construction Equipment completed the Ulsan smart factory in 2025 as its global production hub, targeting top-five status in global construction equipment and expanding capacity by 56%. The same process-innovation playbook became the group's standard approach to manufacturing competitiveness.
Sources
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