Reducing the energy consumption of distillation processes can lead to significant cost savings in refineries and the chemical process industry because distillation is a widely used and energy-intensive separation technology. A distillation column can be heat integrated with heat pumps to reduce the energy supplied by the utility, and it can also be integrated into the overall process to save energy for the overall process. However, previous studies have not adequately investigated the synergistic effect of integrating heat pump assisted distillation into overall processes. In this paper, a systematic design methodology is proposed for the simultaneous heat integration of distillation, its background process and heat pump systems. Such a holistic heat integration approach can lead to considerable energy savings for the overall process. The proposed methodology also includes systematic identification for the energy-optimum placement of the heat pump and its matching with process streams. Furthermore, the impacts of distillation process modifications on the holistic heat integration strategy are examined. A case study is presented to illustrate how the proposed design method is applied and to demonstrate its effectiveness in saving energy. For the case study, the hot and cold utilities are reduced by 61.5% and 20.6% compared to energy consumptions for the base case. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.