Manufacturing companies' cost competitiveness with respect to equipment management can be achieved by satisfying additional market demands by their own capacity without purchasing additional equipments. In essence, it can be accomplished by making continuous investigation into bottlenecks and improvement on them. Therefore, equipment performance measure systems should be designed so that they can support manufacturing companies' such endeavors. With the purpose of establishing an effective equipment performance measurement system for detecting and improving bottlenecks, this study (1) suggests some desirable features that such a system should have, (2) evaluates conventional equipment performance measurement systems in terms of their usefulness for the detection and improvement of bottlenecks, and (3) proposes an improved system. We also perform a simulation experiment to demonstrate the limitations of the conventional systems and show how the proposed system can resolve the problems