AbstractClassical control charts were developed with the assumption that the quality characteristics being monitored are independent. However, observations from several time‐dependent processes, such as industrial or manufacturing, are bound to be autocorrelated such that their autocorrelations decay gradually (long memory) rather than exponentially (short memory). Runs rules monitoring schemes have been proposed in Statistical Process Control literature to monitor processes in the presence of autocorrelation by incorporating the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) class of models which can only handle autocorrelation with a short memory. This paper therefore incorporates the autoregressive fractionally integrated moving average (ARFIMA (1,d,1)) model into four one‐sided runs rules schemes to monitor the mean of an autocorrelated process with long memory. The performance of these four one‐sided schemes was assessed using average run length (ARL) and expected ARL (EARL) metrics. Based on the ARL and EARL of the improved runs rules (IRR) schemes, the IRR5‐of‐5 and IRR2‐of‐7 were found to issue an out‐of‐control signal faster than the corresponding standard runs rules (RR) schemes, RR5‐of‐5 and RR2‐of‐7, respectively. Also, the four one‐sided schemes IRR5‐of‐5, IRR2‐of‐7, RR5‐of‐5, and RR2‐of‐7 in their steady state condition perform better than their corresponding zero state condition. We further observed that as the fractional parameter d increases, the detection ability of the monitoring schemes reduces. The application of the four one‐sided schemes was demonstrated on the diameter of cable production.