Today’s market is subjected to numerous changes due to the need of continuous improvement of different commercial brands in order to survive against competitors. This competition drives the evolution of industrial processes, to satisfy the high customers’ requirements. It means that factors such as flexibility, adaptability and agility are crucial for the successful development of industries, which experience some degrees of uncertainty due to machine breakdowns, delays and market fluctuations among others. The current trend in manufacturing industries consists in the implementation of distributed control systems (DCS), substituting the earlier programmable logic controllers (PLC) systems where a main processor operated as the central unit of the system. To this end, the application of function blocks (FB) compliant with the IEC 61499 standard represents an innovative technique for dealing with the design and programming of DCSs. These FBs enable the creation of event-driven networks governed by embedded algorithms that can be used to enhance the flexibility and portability of industrial job-shops based on a distributed architecture. Job-shop floors represent a principal concept in manufacturing industries. This project is focused on the integration of a computer numerically controlled (CNC) machine and a gantry robot which must be coordinated and cooperate for the achievement of an industrial machining and assembly process. It implies the design of a PLC-managed distributed cell using nxtControl software. This software facilitates the construction of FBs-networks to control both machines and enables the communication process via service interface function blocks (SI-FB). Likewise, the whole process will be monitored using an interface also created within nxtControl which will allow the operator to decide the batch and characteristics of the production. This project is also intended to set the basis for the understanding of the FB concept defined in IEC 61499 which moves away from earlier scan-based systems to event-driven models, aiming to contribute to the development of future research in the function blocks area.