Team Work Makes The Dream Product
The sort of team you need to commercial new chemical products
Hey, welcome back. I hope the weekend was restful. I spent some time thinking about the minimum team you need to field when it comes to chemical product development in order to successfully commercialize something new and the list was longer and more detailed than I put here, but I thought it might be worth sharing.
This issue of the newsletter and the next are sponsored by:
We are at our best when we work together. The Beatles are a great example of four different people coming together to make some amazing music. Making new chemical products is no different and often involves a cast of characters more diverse than you might find in a band. Even if you are the best chemist in the world with something that will change XYZ for the better, you cannot commercialize your ideas without a solid team behind and/or out front of you implementing your ideas or making them better.
When I interviewed Boudewijn Van Lent about getting to the top of the proverbial career ladder one of his two pieces of advice was to be a great team player:
The final piece of advice was that being a team player is important. This might sound cliché, but if you are the person who makes every team better either through your ability to motivate, bring out the creativity of others, or that can enhance communication then this is very valuable. You can be the most talented chemist in the company, but if you can’t function in a team then it doesn’t really matter. Companies are like sports teams and the higher quality team [almost] always wins.
Doing and being a good researcher is different from being good at developing and commercializing products that make an impact on the world. The chemical industry is a mature industry and the majority of chemists out there will likely be doing a bit of everyone else’s job if they want to be effective. This is primarily due to chemical companies operating on a bare minimum of people.
If you are going into the chemical industry as a chemist or something that is somewhat adjacent here are all the functions you need to help you do your job and why they are important.
Sourcing + Supply Chain
So, you want to make a new chemical product using interesting raw materials and you want to go after new customers and new markets with your innovation skills. Raw materials do not just magically appear though, especially at scale, and the sourcing team is often constantly looking for better prices on existing raw materials as well sourcing new raw materials and companies that could make what you need to develop that next great product.
Sourcing teams are often not technical though so as the scientist or engineer doing the product development you often need to provide guidance to your sourcing team as well as sit in on meetings or calls with potential suppliers. Part of your day to day job might involve testing and approving new suppliers for existing raw materials and this is helping your sourcing team become successful in their job.
There is a give and take with your sourcing team. You need to both support them and at times fill in for them with suppliers when they might be busy dealing with a force majeure crisis. If your company has $300-500 million in yearly revenue you might have 2-4 sourcing professionals supporting your entire business. These are your points of contact to your suppliers and contract manufacturers.
The supply chain team is complementary to the sourcing team. They are forecasting the current demand for raw materials as well as finished goods. They might be doing the master scheduling for the network of manufacturing sites that produce your goods and getting the things you need ordered. On any sort of new product development project they are the ones ensuring that you not only have enough space for this new stuff, but that once it's commercial you are producing enough.
Marketing + Sales
Before I started working as a professional chemist my concept of marketing was skewed towards thinking that marketers were a modern version of Don Draper.
In reality your marketing team is often supporting and translating what your sales team is seeing with their customers to needs and wants of the market and how much the market might be willing to pay for your product. There are often two distinct roles in a marketing department, product manager and marketing manager and I believe we are headed towards mostly just having product managers.
A good product manager will have their finger on the pulse of their market as well as understanding the next 3-6 months of obstacles headed their way and the next 3-5 years of what products need to get developed. They might be enlisting the help of advertising agencies to help market your products or technologies and they might be working with the sales team to set the prices and margins of the products that you develop. The more profitable you are the better off the whole company is and this is why they might get paid “the big bucks.”
The sales team might look completely different depending on where you are in the spectrum of chemical companies. If you are closer to oil and gas you might have a few account managers that manage the relationships with your big customers and distributors. If you are further downstream towards the end consumer of the product your sales team might be calling on that final distribution network such as Home Depot or Walmart. You think super glue sells itself?
Your marketing and sales team is often non-technical. Their skill set often revolves around being good at talking to people, building relationships, and selling. The product that you develop is often shaped by what your sales and marketing team tell you. They might propose that customers really need fire resistance without using phosphate ester fire retardants because people are afraid of bioaccumulation (also, perchlorinated biphenyls are bad too). They are the ones telling your executive team that if you can develop X product then they will bring in Y dollars.
If your sales and marketing team is super lean you might be going to customers and asking them what they want. You might be figuring out how much your product costs to see if a 30-50% margin might be possible. You might be selling your potential customers on why they should try your new polymer or surfactant in their formulation and what sort of value they will be getting over your competitor.
Manufacturing + Engineering
So, you’ve got your product prototype developed. You know that it’s going to make Y dollars if you can produce it and your sales team has customers trialing samples. It’s likely time to scale up and this is when you need to rely on your manufacturing team and the capital project engineers that make your products a reality.
I’m using manufacturing here, but it’s really a broad term that might encompass process engineers, operators, scheduling, and quality control to name a few different functions. These are the people that keep your plants producing and when it comes time to take your product from the laboratory to the plant they are the ones that will be making it for you. As the product developer you will be working on the plant’s schedule for your first manufacturing trial and this might mean at 2 AM on a Saturday morning or 7 PM on a Tuesday night to see your first scale-up occur.
Manufacturing teams often want as much figured out as possible before they run the first manufacturing trial. They are often dealing with larger quantities than have ever been used before and the focus on safety should never be minimized. Just because something works at 100 milliliters in a lab doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to work in a 55 gallon drum pilot reactor much less a 10,000 gallon reactor. This is why a good product development team will have at least one chemical engineer assisting the product development process to ensure it’s viable for your plants.
If you don’t have a chemical engineer and you are just a regular chemist you might be running the experiments
Product Stewardship + Environmental Health And Safety + Legal
The product stewards are the people who get your safety data sheet together in the event you need to ship a new chemical. The EH&S people are there to try and limit the harm that can be done to you, that you can do to yourself, that you can do to others, and the environment throughout your daily job. The legal team, usually consisting of a few very busy in-house lawyers, paralegals, and maybe even a patent agent, are trying to make sure your confidential disclosure agreements are in place with suppliers and customers, that your intellectual property is protected and that you are not infringing on others, and that you are staying on the right side of the law.
If this team is doing their job well it’s smooth sailing even in the event that your plant has an uncontrolled chemical release. If you want to protect your intellectual property, get a chemical registered with the EPA, or bring in a new chemical/raw material to your manufacturing location then you are going to need to rely heavily on this team.
In the event this team is lean you might need to pitch in by doing a lot of your own patent research and giving it all to an attorney to help come to a legal conclusion. Scientists and engineers should never be coming to their own legal conclusions. You may also be asking your suppliers for regulatory profiles on new raw materials that you are bringing into your plant.
A Message From My Sponsor
Accelerate and secure the commercialization of your chemicals and materials
Chemical innovation is a long and expensive journey, and often ends in commercial failure. With SpecialChem Insight Solutions, it is now fast, painless and less risky to commercialize a new product or enter a new market. In 3 to 6 months, you will have all the insights and recommendations you need to successfully launch your product.
In just a few weeks, we collect hundreds of datapoints from our own network of technical buyers — the largest in the world — to identify and validate your best market opportunities:
Maximize your commercialization ROI
Reduce your risk of failure
Earn revenue earlier
Save your resources
Protect your confidentiality
“Insight Solutions performed 4 times better than expected. We obtained results really fast, that allowed good decisions from multiple market sources. 32 customer interviews in 8 weeks vs. 2 years with our standard process!” To learn more go here
Why This Is Important
By no means is the list above exhaustive or complete. I’m sure there are functions that I’m missing, but these are the big functions that definitely have to be in place and they are often organized around these verticals into the specific executive leader. The EH&S and Product Steward teams might report up through the general counsel for the company. The Sales and Marketing teams will typically report up through a business unit manager to the CEO. The Operations and Engineering teams might report up through a plant manager while the engineering team might go directly to the Chief Operating Officer.
When you start working for a chemical company or a chemical start-up these functions are your biggest collaborators outside of R&D.
If you are building a start-up from an idea or result you had in the lab then these additional functions are what you will eventually need to commercialize your idea.
Without these additional functions doing their jobs and working with each other and the R&D team then there is no company and the prototype or product idea will stay in the lab. All of the work that the R&D might have done for years or even a decade will just be lab work and it will have minimal impact, perhaps if the work is patented someone else will build on your work later if you can never make it to market. The potential that your idea or product could have out in the global marketplace is dependent completely on a special cast of characters that each play a unique role in product commercialization.
This concept of teamwork is powerful and teams that trust each other tend to win in whatever endeavor they attempt. Most problems with chemical companies and their ability to create and launch new products will originate in getting these different functions to work well together. We might view that collaboration through process work streams, which are often broken, outdated, or just do not exist.
In lieu of work streams or project managers it’s all dependent on people coming together on their own to get things done. If you want to make world class products then you need world class people working as a team.
Tony