Through product development and design, manufacturers wield great influence on the entire product’s life cycle resulting in creating value to customers and thus, have great potential to decouple this value provision from linear resource consumption to a Circular Economy (CE). However, since CE is a systemic concept rooted in the principle of conservation of resources, its implementation cannot only be done in one of the firm’s functions or facilities, as it requires collaboration and commitment enterprise wide and conscious management of stakeholders. In view of this, the current research focuses on the identification and evaluation of the most critical decisions across functional areas in manufacturing and how they may impact the implementation of CE. In so doing, this study contributes with building a solid base of empirical research on CE in the manufacturing sector, hence contributing to literature on CE and manufacturing.