Multivariate statistical process control (MSPC) has been widely used for monitoring chemical processes with highly correlated variables. In this work, a novel statistical process monitoring method is proposed based on the idea that a change of operating condition can be detected by monitoring a distribution of process data, which reflects the cot-responding operating conditions. To quantitatively evaluate the difference between two data sets, a dissimilarity index is introduced. The monitoring performance of the proposed method, referred to as DISSIM, and that of the conventional MSPC method are compared with their applications to simulated data collected from a simple 2 x 2 process and the Tennessee Eastman process. The results clearly show that the monitoring performance of DISSIM, especially dynamic DISSIM, is considerably better than that of the conventional MSPC method when a time-window size is appropriately selected.