During the life cycle of a chemical plant, most theoretical knowledge is concentrated in the design phase.
Once the plant enters operation, it is handed over to the production organization, which typically has strong operational capability but a more limited exposure to the theoretical frameworks used during design.

These two domains are not in opposition. On the contrary, they are meant to support each other.
In practice, however, this integration rarely happens.

During my years as plant manager responsible for both operations and technical services, we repeatedly attempted to bridge this gap by transferring experienced operations engineers into engineering roles, expecting a natural cross-contamination of knowledge.

The outcome was often unexpected.

Many of these capable and motivated engineers underperformed in engineering environments and experienced significant frustration compared to their peers. At the same time, operations derived little benefit from their transfer.

This was frequently attributed to insufficient training.
A more uncomfortable question emerged instead: why did fresh graduates, with no operational experience, often outperform seasoned operations engineers in engineering roles?

The implicit expectation was that exposure to design and theoretical work would allow transferred engineers to act as a bridge between operations and engineering. In reality, the bridge rarely materialized.

Interestingly, a different pattern was observed in the Maintenance department.
Maintenance tended to benefit the most from cross-fertilization between Operations and Technical Services. While we rarely transferred operations engineers directly into maintenance roles, the Maintenance organization consistently demonstrated a greater ability and willingness to absorb and integrate explicit knowledge from both Operations and Engineering.

Over time, this led Maintenance to emerge as a de facto leading department, not because of formal authority, but because of its ability to maintain a coherent, system-level understanding of the plant.

Also to be said that because of the necessity of the Maintenance department to manage quite an important budget , especially the turn around ones, they manage to develop quite a good understanding in accounting and finance.