As a result of the impact of information technology on manufacturing, it has been envisaged that a large number of manufacturing organizations in the future will tend to be more coordination-intensive. There is therefore a need for a systems definition tool (or tools) for the analysis and specification of coordination-intensive manufacturing. Similar to the way in which tools such as IDEFo have been developed and used for hierarchical manufacturing structures, such a tool should provide manufacturing systems engineers and managers with an easy-to-use and flexible method of specifying the structure and functionality of these systems. This paper suggests an object-oriented (O-O) systems analysis method to satisfy this requirement, called hierarchical and object-oriented manufacturing systems analysts (HOOM A). This method utilizes the useful features of two general methods of O-O analysis and is developed to support specifically the requirement of systems analysis and definition within the manufacturing context. In addition to enabling the specification of a manufacturing process in terms of objects, HOOM A also provides facilities to deal with the inherent hierarchical structure, and the dynamic aspects of manufacturing operations.