Principal components analysis (PCA) can be used to monitor processes with a large number of variables more efficiently than traditional multivariate control charts. PCA transforms the original variables into a new set of uncorrelated principal components. It reduces the dimensionality of the data while retaining most of the variation. Two papers discussed how PCA can improve process monitoring when there is autocorrelation in the data, and how combining PCA with multivariate exponentially weighted moving average (MEWMA) charts can further enhance shift detection performance. An example showed the PCA-MEWMA approach had a shorter average run length than standard MEWMA alone.