Fouch knew automated sensors could help by, for example, identifying the environmental culprits of the hole-punching issues, but with so many potential options to try he didn’t know where to start. “The worst thing you can do, in a smaller business especially, is muddle through pilot purgatory, hoping to find a viable product,” he says. “When someone else has done it before, they know the viable path, and they can save you the time and the expense.”

That’s just what three directors and managers from Apple’s engineering and operations teams offered when Fouch and Quinn Shanahan, who oversees Polygon’s medical device production and special products, visited the manufacturing academy in October and November, respectively. Over what Fouch estimates was five hours, the Apple employees evaluated Polygon’s challenges and applied the industrial engineering equation of Little’s Law—which can identify capacity bottlenecks—to devise solutions.

The result was a detailed strategy mapping out sensors and software that could affordably track production and alert about anomalies. Polygon can now count the number of passes the tube makes through the grinder, and it will soon be able to understand whether an overheated motor or other factors could explain the botched hole punching, Shanahan says.

If all goes as planned, Polygon will have implemented a working system to address its most significant bottlenecks for no more than $50,000 compared to the $500,000 that an automation consultancy may have charged, according to Fouch. The Apple team is working on visiting Polygon to talk through other upgrades. “They have walked these paths before,” Fouch says. “Without their help, it’s going to take us much longer.”

Apple’s Herrera says giving small manufacturers a sense of the benefits of automation and other technologies could eventually lead them to work with consultants and invest in more expensive systems.

Two other academy participants tell WIRED that they have not received extensive assistance from Apple—Herrera says it comes down to which companies have prepared a “problem statement” that Apple can help with—but they are working to bring what they learned to their factories. Jack Kosloski, a project engineer at Blue Lake, a plastic-free packaging startup, says it was eye-opening for him to hear about the depth of Apple’s product testing.