Processing's Weekly Mixer: Disaster planning in process plants, and more
Welcome to the latest installment of Processing's Weekly Mixer, which highlights recent content from EndeavorB2B brands relevant to process manufacturers.
This week's entry features content from Chemical Processing, Pharma Manufacturing, Control and Plant Services, as well as this week's content from Processing.
Disaster planning in process plants: The best offense is a passive defense
Public scrutiny over chemical plant safety will likely intensify amid global instability and a string of recent near disasters. Consider the incident this past May at an aerospace plastics plant in Garden Grove, California, where an unstable tank of methyl methacrylate triggered mass evacuations and a state of emergency for the surrounding community. Add the 2023 expiration of the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards regulation in the U.S., along with newer technology threats like drones, and plants find themselves at a crossroads.
Active defense strategies often garner much of the attention due to their innovative, high-tech modes of protection. But a safety-by-design approach known as passive defense can prevent disastrous outcomes without a significant upfront investment. Passive defense covers the design, configuration and layout choices that protect plants from damage and production interruptions caused by security threats and other risks.
Unlike active defense, which depends on personnel, sensors and equipment to detect and respond to a threat as it unfolds, passive defense relies on decisions made long before any incident occurs. In today's environment, where plants face everything from cyberattacks to extreme weather to deliberate sabotage, these upfront design choices often determine whether a facility survives an event with minimal disruption or incurs extensive damage and a long shutdown.
Despite the protection they offer, passive-defense provisions are often overlooked in plant design. Most of these measures are inexpensive and straightforward to implement, yet they can prevent operational interruptions and facility damage. A few examples of passive defense strategies include the use of landscaping to hide or camouflage the facility, strategically placed spare equipment and fire-protection measures, including the use of fire-resistant walls around higher-risk operations.
AstraZeneca designs cell therapy facility for zero downtime
Cell therapy manufacturing is entering a new phase of commercial maturity after several years of uneven growth. Momentum accelerated in 2025, with the cell and gene therapy sector recording approximately $12 billion in disclosed investment activity, according to the International Society of Cell and Gene Therapy.
One company investing heavily in that future is AstraZeneca. In 2025, the company opened its $300 million commercial cell therapy facility in Rockville, Maryland, reinforcing its long-term commitment to manufacturing. Now in 2026, the Rockville facility has been recognized as one of the winners of 2026 Facility of the Year Awards by the International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering (ISPE).
“As an industry, I like to say we're kind of like moving up the S-curve,” says Heather Francis, head of cell therapy manufacturing at AstraZeneca. “We’ve been for a while at the bottom of that curve, but now with investment by AstraZeneca and our peers, we’re starting to move up the S-curve in a way that we can really adopt the technologies and scale out what’s needed for these advanced therapies to be realized and have many patients have access. I’m really proud of not only this award, but also all the work we do at AstraZeneca in this space. It’s really exciting.”
A future framework for resilient operations
Reliability culture determines predictive technology success in manufacturing
Over two days of presentations and panel discussions at Ultrasound World 2026, one message from reliability leaders was a constant like the waves crashing on the beach outside in Clearwater, Florida. Predictive maintenance succeeds because of people—not technology.
“Programs don't scale; habits do. You have to make [reliability] part of your day-to-day, and make it part of your culture.” That observation from Jeremy Bey, strategic accounts leader at UE Systems, captures a challenge facing many manufacturers and reliability programs today. Plants are investing in ultrasound, vibration monitoring, artificial intelligence, remote monitoring, and advanced analytics, but the technology itself is rarely the reason reliability programs succeed or fail.
Across presentations from reliability leaders at Michelin, Amazon, FedEx, UE Systems and others, the biggest barrier to predictive maintenance is not access to better tools. (Of course, those industry leaders have the best technology and tools.) The challenge is creating the organizational behaviors and culture that allow those tools to deliver value.
There was plenty of room for discussion about technology at the conference, and it had its time in the spotlight, but speakers spent far more time discussing leadership, training, standardization, and accountability. As Chris Hileman, reliability engineering manager at Amazon, summarized, “At any scale, reliability success is built on cultural consistency, disciplined execution, cross-functional accountability. While technology will amplify what you're doing, it cannot fix it.”
