Distribution-free control charts are an efficient quality monitoring tool to inspect lots of parts manufactured within a finite production horizon. In this work, the performance of the Exponentially Weighted Moving Average chart based on the Wilcoxon signed rank statistic is investigated for on-line monitoring of finite production runs. The chart's on-target performance is evaluated through a specific non-homogeneous Markov chain model under different process scenarios. A numerical analysis is conducted for determining its optimal design and a performance comparison with other available schemes is presented for different symmetric distributions of observations. Finally, an illustrative example is presented to show a practical implementation of the investigated chart.