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Byline: P. Nelson Raja, S.M. Kannan, V. Jeyabalan Competition is worldwide and markets are fast becoming price sensitive. These challenges are forcing companies to implement various productivity improvement efforts to meet the needs of ever changing market demand. The total productive maintenance (TPM) has provided quantitative metric overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) for measuring the productivity of individual production equipment. In future, an extremely important objective is to improve the performance of the whole process or line instead of concentrating only on a single machine. The traditional metrics like throughput and utilisation rate measures, only the part of the performance of manufacturing equipment. They are not helpful in identifying the problems underlying improvements needed to increase productivity. In this paper, an attempt is made to use overall line effectiveness (OLE) as an index of performance evaluation in the production line of a manufacturing system. A new approach is proposed to assess the quality rate of the manufacturing system using principal component analysis (PCA). A detailed methodology for determining the overall line availability, overall line performance and overall line quality is presented. A case study is carried out and the results are discussed.