During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the document management company GRM took on a national responsibility in Peru: processing test results from the vast majority of the country’s labs and reporting them to the Ministry of Health in under 24 hours.
Faced with an exponential increase in demand that was impossible to handle manually, GRM deployed an army of 30 STELA RPA bots to ensure the speed, accuracy, and scalability that the health emergency required.
Client: GRM Information Management Services.
Challenge: Ultimately, to process a volume of COVID tests that exploded from 500 to over 7,000 daily, with a 24‑hour deadline imposed by the Ministry of Health and the impossibility of scaling the human team.
Solution: Consequently, a centralized system executed 30 STELA bots in parallel, which read test data and uploaded it to the Ministry of Health’s web application 24/7.
Additionally, one bot was 5 times faster than a person (using only 20% of the time).
Furthermore, it handled a demand 8 times greater than originally planned.
Moreover, total accuracy in data loading eliminated the risk of human error with critical medical information.
As a result, 100% compliance with the 24-hour deadline provided the government with essential data to manage the pandemic.
Initially, at the beginning of the pandemic, testing volume in Peru was low. Meanwhile, GRM, as the document management partner for the labs, had a team of operators sized for that initial reality of fewer than 500 tests per day. However, when testing became widespread, demand exploded. At the peak of the pandemic, GRM was receiving an average of 7,000 results daily, with peaks of up to 8,500.
Moreover, the Ministry of Health required every result to be reported on its web application within a 24‑hour deadline to monitor the pandemic’s progress and make informed decisions. It was clear for GRM that scaling its manual operation was impossible: they lacked the physical space, the equipment, and, most importantly, the ability to hire and train staff at that speed. In addition, the risk of a bottleneck was immense, and the consequences of failing to deliver the information on time would have been catastrophic for the country’s public health management.
Therefore, the answer to this scalability challenge was massive automation with STELA. A high‑performance architecture was designed: Software Testing Bureau (a STELA partner) received a daily Excel spreadsheet with thousands of cases to process, loaded them into a central database, and a server launched up to 30 STELA bots in parallel to tackle the workload.
Each bot executed a three‑step process:
Moreover, the instability of the ministry’s application under high concurrent load posed an additional challenge. The STELA bots were built with intelligent controls and logic to handle these errors, retry operations, and ensure that every record was processed successfully despite the external system’s failures.
Ultimately, the implementation of the STELA bot army was a resounding success, giving GRM the ability to fulfill its critical mission.
As a result, for Peru’s public health, having the results in under 24 hours was an essential tool for the authorities to combat the effects of the pandemic, take informed health measures, and protect the population.
Working hand in hand with Software Testing Bureau and STELA allowed us to solve a difficult situation for the company, which had to respond to an increase in demand that had not been anticipated. We worked closely with the team, who supported us every day we operated the bots, including holidays, Christmas, and New Year's Eve. In turn, the STELA bots gave us guarantees of effectiveness because no mistakes were made. And we also had a lot of flexibility, as we could adjust the number of bots operating according to demand.