Approach to test a product-service system during service engineering

Service testing is becoming more and more important for manufacturing companies nowadays. Testing services before market launch helps to avoid mistakes and unnecessary costs. The test phase of new service development has often been neglected in business practice, but more and more its value is being fully recognised. A focus of this paper is the development of a new scientific testing approach of product-service bundles and product-service systems. The new model considers not only the service but also the product component. It is shown that there are different possibilities to combine new product and new service development – for example, products and services can be developed separately or in an interactive or integrated way – and that it is in the test phase that both components could be tested under realistic conditions before the market launch. Thereby the importance of the test phase during the development process of product-service bundle is emphasised.