Despite some potential advantages of reactive distillation (RD), reactive distillation may suffer from maintenance/ design problems such as catalyst deactivation/replacement and equipment design. In this work, an alternative design, a side reactor configuration, is sought and the process of interest is production of ethyl acetate via esterification. The reactive distillation study by Tang et al. (2005) reveals that almost 90% conversion takes place in the column base of the RD. This naturally suggests a coupled reactor/distillation configuration where all of the catalyst is packed in the bottoms base, denoted as single-reactive tray reactive distillation (RD-SRT). This mitigates the maintenance problem associated with conventional RD. However, simulation results show that, with the same amount of catalyst loading, the SRT configuration cannot achieve the same performance as the RD (similar to 93% conversion). Another alternative is adding external reactors to the SRT, and this is termed the side reactor configuration (SRC). A systematic design procedure is devised for the SRC design, and the objective function to be minimized is the total annual cost (TAC). The results show that the TAC of the SRC only increases by 5% as compared to that of the RD. A plantwide control structure is developed followed by process identification and controller tuning. The results show that reasonable control performance can be achieved using simple temperature control for the feed flow rate and feed composition disturbances.