Consistent high-quality and defect-free production is the demand of the day. The product recall not only increases engineering and manufacturing cost but also affects the quality and the reliability of the product in the eye of users. The monitoring and improvement of a manufacturing process are the strength of statistical process control. In this article we propose a process monitoring memory-based scheme for continuous data under the assumption of normality to detect small non-random shift patterns in any manufacturing or service process. The control limits for the proposed scheme are constructed. The in-control and out-of-control average run length (AVL) expressions have been derived for the performance evaluation of the proposed scheme. Robustness to non-normality has been tested after simulation study of the run length distribution of the proposed scheme, and the comparisons with Shewhart and exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) schemes are presented for various gamma and t-distributions. The proposed scheme is effective and attractive as it has one design parameter which differentiates it from the traditional schemes. Finally, some suggestions and recommendations are made for the future work. © 2016, Shanghai Jiaotong University and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.