Intensive global competition is pushing manufacturing companies ever harder in their strife for constant profit. As the world evolves into a knowledge based economy, manufacturing companies are increasingly concerned about the acquisition, management and utilisation of advanced R&D information and knowledge from both internal organisations and external resources, like e-journals and digital libraries. This paper describes our recent research on a Knowledge Management and Retrieval system based on Hierarchical Text Classification scheme. This system organises the large volume of manufacturing related electronic documents according to the manufacturing knowledge taxonomy, then classifies and further routes the searching queries based on manufacturing concepts to the corresponding categories for documents retrieval. In this way, better performance of information retrieval is achieved as searching is directed under the guidance of the manufacturing knowledge. ; Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering