This paper is concerned with the development of tuning guidelines and robustness evaluation tools for a simple adaptive control (SAC) scheme. The adaptive technique requires knowledge of only the relative degree of the plant and an upperbound of the process gain. This is an explicit or direct adaptive scheme. The SAC method is evaluated by simulated applications to two processes. The application of SAC to a process with time-delay is also considered in this paper. This issue has both theoretical, because of the strictly positive real (SPR) requirements, as well as practical appeal. Simulation results show the practicality and usefulness of the proposed algorithm.