PLM and Circular Economy

Executive Summary & Goals

The idea of the Circular Economy (CE) is straightforward: to keep products and their component materials in use for a longer period of time before they are discarded or put into the trash where the value is lost forever.

However, the process of creating an inherently more sustainable circular economy from the current linear economy now practiced is not as simple. It will take transformational thinking and disruptive changes to how manufactures approach product development. This starts with reimagining what the delivered “product” actually is; for example, a recurring service instead of one-off sold good.

The transition to a CE will motivate industries of all types to design and manufacture their products in more mindful and thus more sustainable ways, reducing extraction of the planet’s finite resources with less environmental impact. This transformation will create many new business models, investments, technologies, and professional opportunities in Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) in which PLM Green contributors like CIMPA PLM Services are excited to participate.

Historically, PLM strategies and implementations typically focused on improving multidisciplinary digital collaboration across the enterprise and value chain from the ideation stage of a product concept through its engineering design, virtual prototyping, production, maintenance, and finally end of life. PLM-enabling software solutions have already proven they can power this strategy across individual departments and global-spanning business units.

Now is the time to apply the capabilities of PLM to address the requirements of sustainability across the world, including that of the Circular Economy.

A Circular Economy can best be achieved by applying business strategies that employ and extend PLM technologies which enable the reuse, life-extension, repurposing, and remanufacturing of products and component materials back into a repeating regenerative cycle, minimizing waste and value erosion at each stage.

With that background, the PLM Green Global Alliance theme on the Circular Economy aims to gather knowledge, share examples, perform research, and discuss insights on the role and value of PLM strategies and solutions in supporting the Circular Economy.

In doing so, our aspirational goal is to help reverse the following disturbing statistics cited by the McKinsey Center for Business and Environment and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation:

• 80% of all European consumer products end up in landfills after one use cycle.
• 30% of all produced clothes are never sold, and another 30% leave the store with a discount.
• Packaging accounts for 40% of all plastics used globally. Since most packaging is only used once, an estimated 100 billion dollars is lost to the economy yearly.
• 10–15% of all material becomes waste during the construction of a new building.
• 30% of all food is wasted throughout its value chain.

PLM and the Circular Economy Theme Moderator(s)

Focus & Objectives

Our near term focus will be on how best to take advantage of “PLM Levers” for supporting the Circular Economy, and defining what new advancements in capabilities, implementations, and user applications will be needed.

The Circular Economy encompasses business models and objectives that seek to:

• Maximize the duration of the use time and maximize the availability of products/services with the lowest consumption of resources, parts, and materials (maintenance, repair).
• Development, increasing services (and/or businesses) to follow-up, support, and take charge of products all over their lifecycle (development to services).
• Ensure their adaptation to the use cases and market expectations in time (upgrade, retrofits).
• Ensure reuse of the products and/or their components in other contexts (reconditioning, remanufacturing).
• After their use, ensure their recycling minimizes impacts or returns natural materials and/or energy to the environment (recycling, cradle-to-cradle development).
• Ensure the same capabilities for the processes and means involved in developing, producing, distributing, and supporting these products.
• Reduce waste in production, manufacturing, and logistics, reduce reworks, and ensure “right the first time.”
• Manage and monitor the business with adapted performance KPIs linked with sustainability objectives defined over long periods.

PLM’s digital capabilities are essential to enable these Circular Economy business objectives and, more specifically, as examples:

• The support and sharing of all data about definitions and performances of products, services, and industrial systems throughout their lifecycles with memory and traceability of their evolutions retained.
• The support of robustness engineering capabilities such as management of products, processes and manufacturing Failure Mode & Effect Analysis, management of key characteristics, calculation, and simulation of Mean Time Between Failures.
• Modeling and simulation of Circular Economy requirements and solutions in products, services, and industrial systems.
• Drive of the maturity/lifecycle collaborative management process.
• The connection and integration of data about systems of systems, products, and services to support the development of service businesses.
• Management of all data and provision of traceability needed to meet regulation requirements.

Based on the above observations, we can distinguish different levers of actions to be used by PLM solution providers, consulting professionals, and their industrial customers:

• Define performances and requirements and set up management/steering processes to meet sustainability objectives.
• Rethink and move business models toward the new market paradigm of a sustainable world.
• Adapt and transform development and operational value chains to deliver these new business models.
• Accelerate ramp-up and maturity of PLM digital platform capabilities as a critical enabler of business process transformation.

We believe the primary mechanism for the development and acceleration of the Circular Economy value chain lies within the PLM system digital architecture. This includes the adoption and integration of new technologies — like AI/ML, virtual prototyping, digital twins, and even gaming — to meet the sustainability challenges humanity now faces.

Agenda & Activities

We propose in our PLM & Circular Economy theme working group to exchange experiences, thought leadership, and most importantly, professional support and encouragement to amplify and accelerate our voices and actions. As in the other PLM Green themes, we will do so by educating, advocating, and collaborating across the boundaries of technical disciplines, different industries, and international borders.

We will pursue these objectives using a plan composed of several elements that could include: points of view commentaries, use cases, topical discussion groups, virtual round-tables, articles and blog posts, book and paper reviews, recorded interviews, industry surveys, conference presentations, and participation as guest speakers in webinars hosted by others.

No one association, business, or NGO, regardless of how large or small, can produce all the advancements and innovations for sustainability that are needed. Thus communicating, cooperating, and collaborating (not competing) with other aligned professionals, companies, organizations and alliances will be needed which we enthusiastically look forward to.

Invitation to Participate & Collaborate

To participate in our PLM and Circular Economy group, we invite you to first, if you have not yet done so, to join the PLM Green Global Alliance LinkedIn Group, then contact our moderator Evgeniya Burimskaya to share your interest and expertise.

References & Resources

Here below, we have begun to share a curated list of featured case studies, white papers, blog posts, presentations, webinars, and recorded interviews on the role of PLM-enabling technologies in manifesting a circular economy.

We invite you to send us resources and examples for inclusion that you have come across in your work, company, industry, or country to info@plmgreenalliance.com.