This paper presents a simple method for identifying first- and second-order processes with dead-time by using moments of a single rectangular pulse response in an open-loop system. A closed-form formula is proposed to determine all parameters of four types of process models for a stable linear time-invariant process. It is shown that the same approach can be extended to the identification of multi-input, multi-output linear processes. It is demonstrated through a comparative analysis that the proposed identification method results in good accuracy with a noisy output, and is also able to closely approximate various high-order processes in those low-order models. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.