Manufacturing in North America is rapidly declining resulting in outsourcing and unprecedented job losses and associated socio-economic consequences. Responsive manufacturing is proposed as a remedy. However, organizations cannot become truly responsive without achieving a complete understanding of their production operations. While such understanding can be facilitated with the help of visual modeling techniques, the limitations of current techniques prevent organizations from fully realizing their potential. Concept mapping, a visual knowledge modeling technique, is applied for the first time to model essential material, resource, and information flow on the manufacturing shop floor to gain a comprehensive understanding of the production operations. It is found that a concept map with the right combination of structure, symbology, and level of detail can effectively represent the shop floor, aid the identification of potential disturbances, and provide insight. The concept map is also compared to existing visual modeling techniques to demonstrate its abilities.