Today, due to shop-floor uncertainties and widespread cross-enterprise collaborations, manufacturing systems of enterprises are increasingly demanded to be agile, adaptive, flexible and interoperable. Process planning systems are mission-critical constituent components of manufacturing systems in machining job shops of small and medium-sized enterprises in the machining and metal cutting sector. Cloud-based adaptive distributed process planning, which includes global supervisory planning in the cloud and local operation planning based on function block and cloud technologies, provides an effective approach for enhancing agility, adaptability, flexibility and interoperability of manufacturing systems.