Consider a series system of the type in the Series Simulation.

xlsm file. There are two stations. Each station has three machines, and the mean processing time for each machine is 3.1 minutes. Parts arrive to station 1 at a Poisson rate of 0.8 per minute. The processing times at one station are constant; at the other, they are exponentially distributed. Where would you rather have the constant processing times—at station 1 or station 2? Does the answer depend on the number of buffers in front of station 2? Experiment to find out.