Consider a system with a single workstation that processes jobs one at a time. Jobs arrive to the factory at a rate of one per hour. An analysis of the arrival data indicates that these inter-arrival times have a squared coefficient of variation (SCV) of 1.5. The service time mean is 0.75 hours with an SCV of 2. The company policy is to work on orders k at a time. That is, orders are held until there are k jobs, then this group of jobs is released into the factory for processing. Since there is no physical reason for holding the incoming work and forcing it into groups, what is the impact on cycle time of this batching operation for specified k values?

(a) k = 2.

(b) k = 3.

(c) k = 4.

(d) k = 5.