The DU Lounge

The first 23 years or so I worked in, or ran, a department whose function was to figure out what it would take to convert a 2 liter flask reaction to an 18,000 gallon reactor. (Or a continuous process running 100g per minute to a system running 15,000# per hour.)
The effect of scale on ideal kinetics, the compromises caused by surface to volume ratio, the impact of laminar flow on heat transfer, ways to enhance turbulence, determining mass & heat transfer limitations, and so on.
The last 20 years I ran a group that monitored, analyzed data (process, quality & financial) from processes/products around the world. If something looked wrong or that entropy was setting in, we'd get on a plane & go fix it.
We saved the company and average of 12x what it cost to have us there, year after year. Because of that, they pretty much left us alone, so we were quite independent.