The Situation with Paper

On top of the actual cost of running the hidden factory, there are some serious disadvantages of paper media, which up until recently have been accepted without question because there were no alternatives. 

The paper-based operation is based on a split between execution and approval of operational steps in the pharmaceutical environment. Paper is an unintelligent medium. The real execution steps are separated from the approval steps that cause both a delay in time and a supervision of the production status, which is far from real time and can lead to a bottleneck in the production process. 

Workflow is not transparent. As paper documents exist only as a physical media during the production process from which data can be read only by physically handling the actual papers, only one person at a time can get insight into the content of the information. Additionally, the information work has to be conducted in a strictly serial manner, in which each operation awaits the paper to enter the area of that particular operation. This in turn requires the information to go through a stream of waiting points for each 

Paper-based information cannot be easily reused. Although papers may be copied, they can be used only as the specific type of information they contain. In contrast, electronic information may be copied from one information type to another immediately. For example, a series of batch records may be converted immediately into a trend study if they are contained in a database if they are on paper, a separate work activity is required to establish overview trend evaluations. The consequence of this is very poor information management, in which there are only few ongoing overview activities on the information, which in turn is a huge waste of the potential compared to what could be deducted from the many observations. 

To summarize, paper is an excellent short-term choice because 

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