It usually happens when the paper permit was copied field for field into a digital form without rethinking the process, so every approver still has to open it, read it and sign it in sequence, except now they have to be at a computer to do it. Add a few mandatory fields that nobody filled in on paper and the digital version ends up slower than what it replaced.
A digital permit should be faster because it can do things paper cannot, like route to approvers on their phones, run checks in parallel where the process allows it, prefill what the system already knows about the job and the equipment and show exactly which approval the permit is waiting on. If those things are not part of the design, the permit is just a slower piece of paper.