Best Practices in Managing Process Research

Session Chair: 

• Joe Schroer, SABIC

Session Description:

Chemical process research and development can be thought of as a separate function with its own challenges.  The aim of this session is to share experiences and provide some helpful guidelines in managing chemical process research. Issues like defining the interface between modeling and experimental results, determining what the best scale for experimentation is, and finding the right organizational structure, like how to develop skilled talent, allocate resources, set and track objectives, and collaborate with outside parties and within one’s own organization are some of the relevant aspects in this area.

Schedule:

Abstracts:

Downright Project Management

The management of an engineering project is too important to be left to chance. Having a management plan will provide the ability and control to shape the project as desired, and also will justify a project manager's existence.

To develop a management plan that works for a particular project, careful thought should be given to determine what's consistent with the manager’s mission and philosophy. Then, with that in mind:

• Consciously choose or design a management model that will comfortably fit the project and will accomplish your final goals.
• Define the relationships among administrative staff, engineering staff and the technical crew to conform to the needs of effectively operating the project management structure you've chosen.
• Develop, with appropriate input from those affected, a comprehensive set of policies and procedures to cover the five essential management areas: people; money; supplies and equipment; activities; and relations within as well as the outside world.
• Design a regular system and schedule for evaluating and adjusting the management plan, so that it will continue to function successfully with continuous improvement based on dynamic feedback.

The author will make an effort to illustrate how to utilize the associative and cognitive knowledge acquisitions in the curving of the project management plan, with examples of his almost three decade of engineering practice. When you have a management plan that seems right for your specific project, you've completed a necessary step on the road to effective action. In a project the destination is important and also fixed, while the path is not fixed, although every step of the journey is of cardinal importance.

"Intrapreneurship": How to Manage New Process Development to Maximize Value

Process development must marry business needs and opportunities with de-risking of scientific and technical realities.    A process development lead must insure that economics, technical feasibility, and sustainability footprint are being addressed in parallel, so that key issues and potential showstoppers are identified early, and organizational resources are optimally deployed across the R&D portfolio. For a new lead in process development, this means extensive networking to bring in needed skills and expertise. Successful program leads must take ownership outcomes, and think like an “intrapraneur” in effectively managing time and resources. The spectrum of activities involved present substantial opportunities for enhancement and both personal and professional growth.

Case Study: Debottlenecking a Solid Liquid Isolation: Laboratory to Capital Project

This work is a case study in the development efforts required to effectively de-bottleneck a bulk API intermediate manufacturing process.  The goal was to increase process capacity within the constraints of quality, timeline, manufacturing footprint space and capital constraints. The existing solid-liquid isolation step was originally done using a batch centrifuge that was shared with a subsequent step in the process. Development work was done to optimize the upstream crystallization step to improve performance of current operations and create the necessary critical physical property data and filtration mechanisms to drive the selection process to identify the best technology.  This work identified the indexing belt filter as the best technology. A pilot study was done with an indexing belt filter to verify proof of concept. This work revealed significant cake cracking occurred, resulting in non-uniform deliquoring and cake washing that led to the degradation quality of the isolate solids.  Further development work was required to identify the necessary conditions required to avoid cake cracking.  A second round of pilot studies was done on a larger scale that provided both proof of the generation of quality wet cake and the necessary design data for large scale purchase. The end result is the generation of a new isolation process, a semi- continuous filtration that increased capacity 84%, created less handling and better upstream and downstream process flow.