In modern manufacturing environments, vast amounts of data are collected in database management systems and data warehouses from all involved areas, such as product and process design, assembly, materials planning, quality control, scheduling, maintenance, fault detection and so on. Data mining has emerged as an important tool for knowledge acquisition in manufacturing databases. This paper reviews the literature dealing with knowledge discovery and data mining applications in the broad domain of manufacturing with an special emphasis on the type of functions to be performed on data. The major data mining functions to be performed include characterization and description, association, classification, prediction, clustering and evolution analysis. The papers reviewed have therefore been categorized in these five categories. It has been shown that there is a rapid growth in the application of data mining in the context of manufacturing processes and enterprises in the last 3 years. This review reveals the progressive applications and existing gaps identified in the context of data mining in manufacturing. A novel text mining approach has also been applied to the abstracts and keywords of 150 identified literatures to identify the research gaps and find the linkages between knowledge area, knowledge type and data mining tools and techniques applied. 1 Wolfson School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, Loughborough University, Loughborough, Leicestershire, UK, LE113TU