Problem
A typical insurance claim requires submitting two sets of documents. D1 documents relate to the insurance policy and insurance holder while D2 documents relate to the damage and the estimated cost of repair. Once submitted, insurance claims will be checked for completeness by a clerk which takes about 5 minutes. D1 documents are then reviewed for 20 minutes by an insurance adjuster to determine what is covered by the insurance policy. In parallel, D2 documents are investigated for 15 minutes by the clerk and the damage is evaluated for 15 minutes by an appraiser. Afterwards, the insurance adjuster combines D1 and D2 documents and files a settlement report which takes about 5 minutes. Note that all times represent average flow times including activity and waiting times.
A. Determine the flow time of the process and explain the role of the critical path for the process flow time.
B. Discuss the effect on process flow time if 40% of D2 documents need to repeat the investigation due to inaccurate information.
C. Aside from reducing rework, explain what other measures the insurance company could take to reduce the activity time of the process.
D. Disregarding rework, explain what is the bottleneck resource of the process and by which two general means can the bottleneck be broken.
E. If there was an additional flexible worker available to support the clerk and/or insurance adjuster, discuss how this additional worker should be allocated to maximize the process throughput.