Multi-way principal component analysis (MPCA) had been successfully applied to monitoring the batch and semi-batch process in most chemical industry. An improved MPCA approach, step-by-step adaptive MPCA (SAMPCA), using the process variable trajectories to monitoring the batch process is presented in this paper. It does not need to estimate or fill in the unknown part of the process variable trajectory deviation from the current time until the end. The approach is based on a MPCA method that processes the data in a sequential and adaptive manner. The adaptive rate is easily controlled through a forgetting factor that controls the weight of past data in a summation. This algorithm is used to evaluate the industrial streptomycin fermentation process data and is compared with the traditional MPCA. The results show that the method is more advantageous than MPCA,especially when monitoring multi-stage batch process where the latent vector structure can change at several points during the batch.