The manufacturing cell design problem (MCDP) proposes to divide an industrial production plant into a number of manufacturing cells. The main objective is to identify an organization of machines and parts in a set of manufacturing cells to allow the transport of parts to be minimized. In this research, the metaheuristic algorithm called Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) is implemented to solve the MCDP. The ABC algorithm is inspired by the ability of bees to get food, the way they look for it and exploit it. We performed two types of experiments using two and three cells, giving a total of 90 problems that have been used to solve the MCDP using ABC. In the results experiments, good results are obtained solving the 90 proposed problems and reaching the 90 global optimum values. Finally, the results are contrasted with two classical metaheuristics and two modern metaheuristics.