A PLM Vision for Circular Economy

Due to growing concerns with sustainability issues and the emergence of the Circular Economy (CE) paradigm, combined with recent technological changes and consequent increase in competitiveness, there is a pressing need to redefine the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) approach. PLM needs to incorporate aspects that would enable the shift to this paradigm, such as enhanced collection and evaluation of information coming from production processes, distribution, retail, consumers, and collaboration in an extended enterprise context, by implementing enabling technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data. This paper proposes a vision, based on the state of the art, for a CE enabled PLM, having the Portuguese footwear industry scenario as a reference.