Today, manufacturing is being shaped by the paradigm shift from mass production to on demand dictated, personalized, customer-driven and knowledge-based proactive production. Thus, shorter product life cycles, an increased number of product varieties, high performance processes, flexible machines and production systems result in an increased complexity in all factory level domains from product design, process development, factory and production planning to factory operation. To handle this complexity, new knowledge-based methods, technologies and tools to model, simulate, optimize and monitor planned and existing manufacturing systems are required. This paper presents the challenges, the approach and an overview of the results of the EU-FP7 funded project Apps4aME (GA No 314156) and provides a concise overview over the Engineering Apps (eApps) approach that the project is based on. The project aims at the comprehensive consideration of ICT-based support of Manufacturing Engineering in all the above mentioned domains, called advanced Manufacturing Engineering (aME). The different life cycles are aligned by the development of a Reference Data Model that provides a detailed overview of all relevant domain-specific and inter-domain interdependencies. This life cycle-oriented model enables an integrated product design, process development, factory planning as well as production planning and factory operation. All stakeholders in these activities are supported by eApps that are conceived, developed and validated with the help of four industrial use cases spanning very diverse industrial branches. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.