How a Mobile App Transformed Industrial Bearing Maintenance

Key Highlights

• Mobile-first app that guides bearing mounting and dismounting, captures measurements with tolerance warnings, and generates traceable reports.
• Accedia’s cross-functional Product team rebuilt the solution, modernized legacy architecture, and enabled faster, more stable CI/CD releases.
• In six months: 30–40% more complete job records, 15–25% less avoidable rework, and ~50% faster report creation.

About the Client

Our client is a global leader in bearing manufacturing and rotating equipment performance. The company serves industrial and automotive customers worldwide with products and services spanning bearings, seals, lubrication systems, and condition monitoring. With a century of engineering expertise and a trusted industrial brand, the company works to reduce energy waste and use resources more efficiently, with a long-term goal of reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions across its supply chain.

The Challenge: From a Catalogue to a Guided Bearing Mounting App

At the start of our collaboration, the application was a classic web and mobile solution that mirrored a bearing product catalogue, technical information, and mounting instructions. The product vision was still evolving, and initial requirements were not fully defined. The client needed a partner who could lead delivery, shape the direction through research, and move fast on decisions.

A key goal was to equip technicians, especially those with less experience, with clear, step‑by‑step guidance in the field. At the same time, the client aimed to extend bearing life, reduce repeat work, accelerate technician onboarding, and support broader sustainability goals. Legacy code and architecture also constrained delivery speed and quality, making modernization essential.

Why They Chose Accedia and How We Collaborated

The client brought in Accedia as an autonomous, cross-functional Product team to rebuild and redesign the field technician mobile app. They chose Accedia for its track record of delivering complex digital products in manufacturing and industrial environments, and proven expertise in modern mobile technologies (SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose) backed by disciplined delivery practices. The team combined a Product Owner, UI/UX Designer, Technology Lead, iOS and Android Engineers, Backend Developers, QA Specialists, and DevOps Engineers. The client’s Product Manager oversaw several initiatives and empowered Accedia to lead product discovery and turn their product vision into roadmap decisions and delivery.

From day one, Accedia worked as an extension of the client’s product organization rather than a traditional outsourcing vendor. Built on trust and independence, the collaboration enabled fast, evidence‑based decisions and a steady delivery pace, ensuring the application evolved quickly to meet real‑world technician needs.

Accedia’s Approach: Product Discovery, UX Research, and Modern Mobile Engineering

We started by building domain knowledge and mapping technicians’ real workflows. This groundwork allowed us to understand the context and where improvements would create the most value in the app. From there, Accedia moved into product discovery, user research, and competitor analysis to identify pain points and opportunities. Since it was difficult to reach less experienced technicians directly, we instrumented the app to capture usage patterns, improved the in-app feedback flow to increase responses, and gathered offline input from service centers and field teams. Each cycle led to UX improvements, from improved navigation and visual guidance to stronger calls to action in the most important flows.

In parallel, we addressed the mobile application’s technical foundations. We replaced outdated frameworks and libraries while continuing to ship value incrementally. Our team established a design system, behavior-driven testing, and CI/CD pipelines, ensuring stable releases and faster feedback.

The Solution: A Mobile App for Guided Bearing Mounting and Maintenance Workflows

The product evolved from a static reference app into a guided workflow tool that helps teams carry out and document bearing replacements. Unlike general-purpose maintenance tools or static catalogues, it combines manufacturer-authored expertise with bearing-specific workflows and checks that help teams standardize best practices. The application allows technicians to filter products, scan barcodes, or use an AI assistant to quickly find mounting and dismounting instructions, preparation steps, and key checks, then follow guided workflows during industrial bearing replacements. 

The AI assistant uses a curated knowledge base of technical documentation and retrieves the most relevant content for each question. The experience is optimized for the field: technicians can ask in natural language and get concise, source-grounded guidance, with links back to the full steps when needed. We also added guardrails and feedback loops so responses stay aligned with approved content and improve over time.

Additionally, the solution prompts users to record measurements, issuing warnings when tolerances are exceeded. After each job, mountings are saved to a journal that builds a replacement history and improves traceability. The solution also enables teams to collaborate by sharing notes and photos, and to export completed workflows as PDF reports for easy distribution. We also refreshed the web experience, but the main focus stayed on the mobile maintenance app, where field use is most critical and widely spread.

Technology Stack

The mobile maintenance software is built natively with Swift and SwiftUI for iOS and Jetpack Compose for Android. We implemented the backend in JavaScript with Node.js, while managing the product design and prototyping in Figma. Quality is reinforced with Cucumber as a testing framework, and Azure DevOps focuses on project management and CI/CD.

Business Impact: Faster, More Consistent Maintenance and Better Traceability

With guided workflows, checklists, and measurement warnings in place, teams standardized how mounting jobs were documented and executed across shifts and locations. Within the first six months of rollout, the client observed a 30–40% increase in consistently completed job records and an estimated 15–25% reduction in avoidable rework, driven by better preparation steps and clearer first‑time‑right guidance. The new reporting flow reduced documentation overhead, cutting the time needed to produce a shareable report by about 50%.

By extending bearing life, the application supports the company’s sustainability agenda, reducing waste and improving resource efficiency. Throughout the project, we worked side by side as one product team, aligning priorities, validating decisions through research and feedback, and delivering improvements in steady iterations. That shared way of working helped the product evolve quickly and stay grounded in real field needs.