Often ranked at the top of the core competencies by manufacturing firms, product design & development (PDD) is indeed a series of knowledge intensive activities. It demands timely information and diverse support from various knowledge sources to help the company remain competitive. Therefore, the integration of current information and existing knowledge, either internally owned or externally located, has become increasingly important. In this paper, a framework to serve PDD personnel for better information and knowledge management purpose based on text mining (TM) methodology is proposed. Several key initiatives undertaken are explained and moreover, the encouraging results achieved in our attempt to integrate manufacturing domain knowledge in conventional TM tasks are demonstrated.