Whiteboards and napkins

When I think about precision in chemistry, I always admire our colleagues in physical and analytical chemistry. Those beautiful curves and line plots seem so perfect, so precise – in comparison with laboratory synthetic chemistry, where you’re scraping the sides of the flask to get a 97% yield. While exact values are achievable in synthetic chemistry, it feels like we often live in a grey area where there is room for 2% error, or sometimes much more.

Although precision is valuable in a synthesis, planning how to produce industrial quantities of a product might begin with something closer to educated guesswork. I’m thinking of the discussions that feel like they can be had on the back of a napkin or very quickly on a whiteboard.

Imagine you’re invited into a conference room and asked: ‘If the customer were to order 200kg of product, how long would it take to make it?’ Here’s where the estimating begins.