About autocorrelated process, there is just a few references
(broken link removed)
and a book
"Advanced topics in Statistical Process Control", the power of Shewhart's Charts by Donald J. Wheeler. SPC press, 1995
Chapter 12, Control Charts for Autocorrelated Data
It's a shame that Wheeler wrote many articles in quality magazine (that you can see on the net), but any about the subject.
In the book, he said that the autocorrelation coefficient does not affect when there is low autocorrelation, so, it's safe to use it anytime, and such is my experience.
PreControl has it's uses, as Steiner said,
"in the final paragraph on control charts of Ishikawa ’s (1982)famous guide,where he wrote “Control charts are easy to construct so are widely used.But there are surprisingly few really useful charts ”
(broken link removed)
But one example that came into my mind is: when the process is drifting (going up or down) very slowly, of course SPC rules could detect it but as a run up or down, but in a chemical process the run up or down could not be a special cause, because most of the time is what is expected.
What, if you can not change anything (reduce variation of the variable), but you want to keep an eye upon the behaviur of the variable, to understand the relationship between variables, or to know what to expect of the process if a parameter is changing.
Darius