Engineering design processes are highly complex and dynamic inasmuch unforeseen changes occur frequently at process runtime. In this paper we present the process management system PROCEED that aids process managers and process participants in planning and enacting the work processes in plant design projects. It is based on the commercial lifecycle engineering tool Comos. PROCEED exceeds the state of the art in process management in several ways. The models used to represent running design processes incorporate aspects of project plans and workflow instances to reflect the current planning and execution states of work processes. Workflow definitions are used to define best practices for repetitive process parts and are enacted to guide process participants. PROCEED ensures consistent changes of process models even at process runtime. A process manager can resort to numerous progress measures in order to get exact quantitative information about the performance of a process. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.