I have known a few plant production managers at several facilities in my career and they seem to share particular attributes. No doubt they fall into a particular Myers-Briggs type.  I can say without a doubt that I am personally disqualified from such activity because I tend to be more of the absentminded professor type.   It takes a certain breed of cat to manage any kind of production facility.  Indeed, your average construction site superintendant is probably better suited to manage a chemical plant than is a chemist. 

Well, OK. That was a bit harsh.  Many chemists could do it if they had to. But if you owned a chemical company and were looking for a new plant manager, you’d probably find that the pool of candidates didn’t include many chemists. There, that is more polite.  Chemists are often tweakers by nature and a chemical plant is not a place for experiments. Plant managers live by the production schedule. They are both masters of and slaves to this schedule.  Their whole careers are about the coordination of material flows- the arrival of raw materials, processing, and the logistics of shipping.

A chemical plant is a big machine through which flows a large stream of money.  Money flows in one side of this machine and out the other side.  Jets of cash flow outward to payroll and raw material vendors. The production manager never forgets that the inflowing stream must always be bigger than the outflowing stream.  Customers insist on just-in-time delivery of products, but they also want 60 days net with a lot of other strings.  The relationship between the controller and the plant manager may be chronically strained.

People who run production plants are really engineers, irrespective of whether or not they hold a diploma in engineering.  Scientists find the thread between cause and effect.  Engineers take that thread and figure out how to use it for fun and profit. Sure, some scientists have engineering sense and some engineers have scientific sense.  But a plant manager is all about running the plant at full speed. When they make tweaks, it is usually on the engineering side.  Usually they are loath to alter chemistry.

In the Navy they have a saying- Fight the Ship.  Use every part of the boat to your advantage.  Slap ’em with the rudder if it comes to that.  A good production manager is crafty, thrifty, and when needed, a brutal task master.  He knows his crew and can and will push them to the edge when needed. 

A really smart plant manager will find and keep the best maintenance people he/she can find.  In fact, a savvy plant manager will always vote to throw a chemist overboard rather than let a maintenance person go.  One of the least acknowledged groups at a chemical plant is the maintenance crew.  To keep the plant up and running you need the skill sets of plumbers, welders, pipefitters, machinists, electricians, iron workers, carpenters, tinners, and a bunch of general handymen and gofers.  Usually you hire people with multiple skill sets.

The best plant managers are steely-eyed SOB’s who speak softly and command respect and maybe a little fear. A plant manager must be able to work effectively with arrogant executives, stubborn accountants, egghead scientists, angry admin staff, defensive production people, and sly construction contractors.  The people skills are as important as the technical skills.

If I were going to hire people for key management positions in a plant, I would hire people from the nuclear Navy. As a group, they have already been screened for many attributes useful to a chemical plant. They tend to be high achievers, have good quantitative skills, have been highly trained for work in hazardous environments, and they understand the importance of following protocol.

What an awkard pair, these chemists and chemical engineers.  To strangers from a distance they might appear almost interchangeable.  Someone from another field might assume that the differences could be as inconsequential as minor variations in accent or hair style are between neighbors.  A simple matter of preference for the practical or the arcane. But that someone would be wrong.

Chemists and Chem E’s are really quite different by training and by disposition.  We chemists think of our field as resting upon the three pillars- Theory, Synthesis, and Analysis.  Chem E’s will agree, but they’ll point out that there is a 4th pillar- Economics. 

Here is an act of convulsive reductionism:  Atomic and Molecular Chemistry (as opposed to Nuclear Chemistry), the science we normally think of when we use the word “Chemistry”, really concerns itself with the behavior of electrons near positive point charges. When we cause a chemical change we are perturbing the disposition of electrons somewhere. In doing so, ensembles of nuclei and their electrons connect, disconnect, or otherwise alter the disposition of the electrons.  Chemists make and break bonds, transfer electrons, or promote electrons to particular energy states.  This work is limited to the outermost layers of the onion. We rarely ever have to consider the inner layers of electrons and we never monkey with the nucleus.

Chemistry is very much an electronic activity. It is the realm of electronic quantum mechanical formalism and machinations at the Angstrom scale. Virtually every chemical change we do involves the twiddling of electrons somewhere.

Chem E’s, on the other hand, practice applied classical physical chemistry.  Unlike organikkers such as myself, they took a serious fancy to P-chem. Their quantum unit is the dollar. These folks can actually put thermo to use for fun and profit. They understand the sacred and profane applications of the gas laws. Chem E’s can specify what sort of pump you need to move whatever variety of hellbroth you care to convey and they can probably estimate the Reynolds number of the rainwater running off your nose.  A Chem E can tell you what kind of materials of construction and seals you need to reflux thionyl chloride in your reactor and what kind of chiller capacity you need to condense it. 

And as engineers, they can plan a construction schedule, work up a cost estimate, and supervise the construction of whatever kind of process equipment you care to specify from the dirt up.  A chemist could probably do it as well, but it would look like a chemist did it.  I have personal experience here.

You probably wouldn’t ask a Chem E to synthesize vitamin B-12.  But they wouldn’t ask a chemist to design a continuous fractional distillation column either.