Manufacturing process planning in flexible manufacturing environments requires a highly efficient computerized representation, since the number of different alternatives grows rapidly as the level of flexibility of the manufacturing systems increases. Furthermore, in order to recommend a good manufacturing plan, it is necessary to be capable of generating all feasible alternatives. This paper describes a state space to represent manufacturing operation plans, which generates a compact representation of all possible manufacturing operation sequences and routes that can be applied to a certain part. The state space representation is a state transition graph in which the nodes represent the manufacturing operation states of the system, and the arcs the transitions between them. Such a representation forms the basis for efficient planning algorithms that enable the manufacturing system to select a course of action according to current factory conditions. Computational experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed representation.