Sustainability is a key issue for companies offering products and services on the global market. The ever-increasing worldwide demand for raw materials in combination with the rising costs for materials and energy challenges companies to make their products, processes and services more sustainable. More and more customers are demanding sustainable products and services due to their increased awareness about environmental protection. By providing access to data, information and knowledge about products and services the concept of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) can be applied to reverse logistics processes to improve sustainability. The term PLM and therefore the functionality of existing PLM systems must be considered as quite different. The paper introduces the concept of item-level Product Lifecycle Management. It investigates the requirements that item-level PLM systems must fulfill in order to support sustainability in reverse logistics processes in an appropriate manner. Existing item-level PLM solutions are then investigated according their suitability in the field of reverse logistics. Keywords: Item-Level Product Lifecycle Management, architecture, integration, item-level, sustainability, reverse logistics.
