To develop performance measures which are clear, timely and relevant for the work floor and the operating departments, it is argued that non—financial measures are needed to measure the internal performance. If some level of internal performance is reached, this influences the customer satisfaction. A review of literature concerning measures for the productive behaviour of a production system shows that the littérature does not include a non—financial measure that can be used. Therefore, the development of a new non—financial performance measure, called the transformation factor, is described based upon basic laws and principles. The transformation factor has been applied to a bottling system. This application shows that the transformation factor can be used to monitor the productive behaviour and to compare design concepts to be able to decided about future production systems.