Enterprises need to cope with increasing volumes of complex and evolving data and at the same time to reduce ‘time-to-market’ for products. As data volumes increase and user communities grow and change with time, enterprise systems must be able to provide access to the enterprise data appropriate to multiple application viewpoints. In addition, the enterprise model must be flexible, adaptable and secure and be designed to maximise reusability of code, to cope with distribution of the enterprise activities and to inter-operate with legacy systems. The era where business rules are buried deep within the application code is coming to an end. Today users themselves seek to dynamically change their business rules and they need systems which can adapt to their evolving business needs, meet their requirements and scale to large installations. This paper outlines how an enterprise model that integrates process and product data modelling has been constructed following a description-driven design approach for the management of large-scale scientific apparatus.