PROCESSIUM, a French company newly implemented in Brazil, is an expert in industrial process engineering. We design, develop and improve processes for the chemical, petrochemical and biotech industries. One of the most important criteria for running a process is the CAPEX and OPEX. Reactive distillation is a process intensification technology particularly suitable to reduce these costs. We present a design study of an ester hydrolysis process in which two process layouts including reactive distillation are compared. The process specification of low residual ester content implies a very high rate of conversion. Reactive distillation achieves this goal without recycling and consequently allows the utilization of compact equipments. Thermodynamic and kinetic data are measured and modeled for further simulations. After process optimization, the economic optimum is determined for each process. The next step is the experimental validation in a reduced-scale reactive distillation column.