Investigating the Effect of Rework Rates-A proposed business process consists of five serial workstations. One caseworker is positioned in each workstation. The processing times at each workstation are exponentially distributed with mean values of 11, 10, 11, 11, and 12 minutes, respectively. The interarrival times are uniformly distributed between 13 and 15 minutes. The workstations have an unlimited queuing capacity, and it is assumed that the downstream transfer time is negligible. The unique aspect of this process is that between workstations 2 and 5, it is possible that the job will need to be reprocessed by the workstation immediately preceding the current one. For example, after workstation 3, it is possible that the job will be sent back to the queue in workstation 2.

When this occurs, the transfer requires 3 minutes. The probability of rework remains the same regardless of the number of times a job is sent back for reprocessing. The rework probability is considered to be the same for all workstations and is currently estimated to be between.5 percent and 10 percent.