Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) has been identified as a key concept within manufacturing industries for improving product quality, time-to-market and costs. Previous works on this field are focused on processes, functions and information models, and those aimed at putting more intelligence on products are related to specific parts of the product lifecycle (e.g. supply chain management, shop floor control). Therefore, there is a lack of a holistic approach to PLM, putting more intelligence on products through the complete lifecycle. In this paper, a PLM framework supported by a proactive approach based on intelligent agents is proposed. The developed model aims at being a first step toward a reference framework for PLM, and complements past works on both product information and business process models (BPM), by putting proactivity on product's behavior. An example of an instantiation of the reference framework is presented as a case study.