## 2 Background  
Since it was launched in 2016, the EWP project has made substantial progress in the implementation of a framework supporting the electronic exchange of students' data by interlinking the databases of thousands of HEIs. Those databases may be hosted by in-house systems or third-party providers that cater for different needs and resources, from large universities with thousands of outgoing students every year to small institutions that send just a few of them whenever a specific collaboration opportunity with a foreign institution appears. In the short term, EWP is seen by the EC as a strategic means to more efficiently manage a budget of 26,000 million euros allocated for international mobilities, attaining time savings, reductions in paper usage and increases in staff productivity [13]. In the longer term, it would provide the foundations to develop and implement far-reaching digital transformation plans for all types of education and training institutions, all levels and for all sectors. Erasmus+ mobility management requires that activities that will take place over a long period of time be recorded from beginning to end. In the process, the HEIs' International Relationships Offices (IROs), the academic coordinators and the beneficiaries of the mobilities must produce and manage many documents and substantial amounts of data. In the paper-based process, even simple confirmations required several people in different institutions to print out, sign, archive and transport tens of pages. Also, HEIs and NAS required extra documents to be transferred. A poll conducted by [PERSON] in 2017 [14] -getting 1050 answers from HEIs of all types and sizes from 31 countries- showed that almost 90% of the HEIs that sent out ~1000 students abroad on Erasmus mobilities per year considered the management workload \"very high\" or \"high\". Only 9.6% of the institutions answered that the workload was \"average\", and not even 1% answered that the workload was either \"low\" or \"very low\". Putting the workload into a historical context, the poll found that more than 67% of the HEIs perceived the workload had increased since 2014, whereas only 8.1% perceived the workload to have decreased. In one study conducted two years later, [PERSON] [15] reported that the workload and the variety of documents required for the management of mobilities were still increasing steadily and that the expectation for the EWP solutions was that they would enable interoperability between more than 2000 in-house systems and more than 50 commercial systems to exchange data electronically and securely, and concerning tens of thousands of mobility activities every year. As of August 2022, the EWP project has almost reached the foreseen gigantic dimensions, with thousands of HEIs, commercial providers and other organisations integrating into the digital ecosystem and taking up the new tools that come with it. As the implementation deadlines set by the European Commission get closer, they are also working together to detect and solve persisting integration and interoperability problems, make the solutions available in all pertinent languages, fully train the management staff, and make the processes accessible and understandable by the beneficiaries of the mobilities. At this point, it is necessary to conduct studies that numerically reveal the benefits of digitalisation, as done in the recent past for other areas such as business, industry, justice or healthcare [16; 17; 18]. As explained in [19], the agenda for HEIs has been complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the sudden massive adoption of online learning schemes. Numerical evidence will help strengthen the HEIs' and NAs' motivation to complete the transition from paper-based processes, notwithstanding the cost that complex software systems entail in terms of licensing, operation, maintenance and/or evolution. This brief literature review covers almost the last six years in which the paperless Erasmus studies have been launched.