In this work, the integration of ARMA filters into the multivariate statistical process control (MSPC) framework is presented to improve the monitoring of large-scale industrial processes. As demonstrated in the paper, such filters can remove auto-correlation from the monitored variables to avoid the production of false alarms. This is exemplified by application studies to a synthetic example from the literature and to the Tennessee Eastman benchmark process. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.