The reason for Process Development remains “to build technical advantage into a company's overall strategy.” But how we do that is undergoing profound changes under such influences as globalization, intensified competition, shifting demographics, evolving corporate cultures, and the on-going development of the information age.

Corporations face mass brain trust retirements among baby-boomers, declining (non-IT) engineering and science graduates, and stock market pressure to grow the business with the same, if not fewer, employees. Nowhere is new technology optional; “reinvent (or at least improve) or die” is a simple fact of life for any technology-based corporation.

To rise to these challenges, we have: shed past hierarchical cultures, adopting instead self-directed work teams; experimented with faster / more flexible ways of sharing our process knowledge gains; worked to better understand and facilitate innovation (e.g., developing differing pathways for new product development suited to differing risk profiles); and honed our basic skills.

This talk will review these trends from the perspective of The Lubrizol Corporation's transportation additives business, citing both gains made and dead-ends left behind. In particular, this talk attempts to answer: “How does Process Development maximize its contribution (to the corporation)?” Special focus will be given to: the role of the process development engineer; the training foundation needed to enable process development engineers; rising to the unique challenges of safety in pilot plants; and how we manage our chief product – knowledge – as the speed of information exchange ever increases.

Hardly a finished story, this talk will close with a summary of the challenges and promises ahead.

The basic themes of the talk are: “balance” over “magic bullet” solutions; the on-going evolution, if not reinvention, of how a Process Development Department makes its impact; and an attempt to frame this flux we are in, and the possible paths ahead.