Current Product Lifecycle Management systems (PLM) have concentrated on product design, not on manufacturing engineering with its development of e.g. Material flows and layouts. This paper proposes an approach to describe how to represent the main required manufacturing process data using ontologies together with generic data standards. This approach makes it possible to develop translations between different software, and also providing users with the meaning of different concepts. It contributes to an efficient management of manufacturing information, with a focus on the material flow information as used in Discrete Event Simulation - DES.