Next-generation manufacturing enterprises need to be sensing, smart and sustainable to be competitive: ‘sensing’ refers to context awareness at internal and external levels; ‘smart’ refers to knowledge-based organisations that adapt to changes and ‘sustainable’ refers to the ability to operate without damaging the environment, community or economy. Although technologies do exist to support the development of such enterprises, there is a need for methodologies that help in the entire enterprise engineering problem. This paper proposes a methodology, based on the principles of enterprise architecture, to design a sensing, smart and sustainable manufacturing enterprise. The methodology aims at adopting the best practices used in enterprise engineering while dealing with the relevant gaps. An analysis of the characteristics of the ‘Sensing, Smart and Sustainable Manufacturing Enterprise’ (S³-ME) is presented to understand the advantages of using the proposed methodology. The methodology comprises the instantiation of five viewpoints presented in the Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing (ISO/IEC 10746 RM-ODP) and redefined by the Smart and Sensing Enterprise Reference Model (S²E-RM). The viewpoint instantiation is described and then exemplified with a case study. As a result of the instantiation, the enterprise is defined through an enterprise model.