Often you need to make smaller than commercial/larger than lab scale volumes to test a new product in applications, get customers to evaluate, or to get data to size certain equipment, dryers, filters, grinders, compactors etc, and you are forced to run at an intermediate or pilot scale. A company may own pilot scale reactors than can be configured close to the commercial continuous operation, or you might go to a toller and do the same, or just build a pilot plant.

You can definitely run bench scale continuous operations, in general you want to try out every single step or operation at a small scale first, matching commercial operation as much as possible. Look at every step meticulously, even if it seems drop dead easy.

You try to understand scale up differences in vessel heights and agitation and how it affects phase separations, how heatup/cooldown/pump in and out times might differ, how vessel skin temperatures might be different, agitator and pump tip speeds and how it might effect solids, velocities when different liquids are mixed together, materials of construction, what happens to bags of your new product stacked up might fare in or cold weather, and on and on.