A growing business drowning in its own paperwork

Atman UK tests over one million electrical items every year for around 1,500 clients. The actual testing was never the problem. The problem was everything that happened around it: tracking which clients were due for annual renewals, chasing those who hadn't responded, converting raw PAT data into professional reports, and issuing certificates that customers needed for compliance, insurance and health and safety records.

All of it was manual. Renewals lived in spreadsheets. Reports were built by hand. Some certificates took up to an hour each to produce. By the time a customer received their final documentation, three to four weeks might have passed since the testing was done. The process required the equivalent of two full-time people - and it still had gaps. Some renewals were being missed entirely, meaning lost revenue and weakened client retention.

The team wasn't doing anything wrong. They were simply being asked to do too much repetitive work, at too high a volume, with tools that weren't built for the scale.

What Highway found when we looked under the bonnet

When Highway Business Services reviewed the workflow, the root cause was clear: the process had never been redesigned as the business grew. What might have been manageable at lower volumes had become a bottleneck. Three stages - renewal tracking, customer outreach, and post-testing documentation - each depended entirely on people manually handling information and reformatting data.

The real cost wasn't just the time spent. It was the opportunity cost. Skilled staff who could have been winning new clients or deepening existing relationships were instead tied up reformatting spreadsheets and manually assembling certificates. Growth was making the problem worse, not better.

The good news: the process was high-volume, repeatable, and followed recognisable patterns. That made it well-suited to an agentic AI approach.

What we built

Highway designed and delivered a backend agentic AI workflow built around the way Atman UK actually operates - not a generic AI product bolted on top.

The workflow covers two core areas:

• Annual outreach and renewal follow-up: The AI-supported workflow identifies clients due for annual PAT testing contact and supports consistent outreach. Staff still intervene where customers don't respond, keeping human judgement where it genuinely adds value.
• Report and certificate production: Raw PAT testing data is converted into professional, consistently formatted customer-facing reports and certificates - a task that previously took up to an hour per job and now takes minutes. A human checking stage remains in place while the system beds in, which is the right call for a compliance-related workflow.

The whole thing was built for volume - 1,500 clients and over a million tested items annually - and designed to scale without simply adding more admin resource.

The project investment was a one-off £5,000. Because Atman UK was already a Highway full support client, there was no separate ongoing AI project fee.

What changed

The results were immediate and measurable.

• Report and certificate turnaround dropped from 3-4 weeks to 1-2 days.
• Production time for individual reports fell from up to an hour to minutes.
• Renewal outreach became consistent and less reliant on manual spreadsheet checking.
• Document formatting and presentation improved noticeably.
• Staff previously absorbed by admin have been redeployed into new client acquisition and revenue-generating work.

Based on the staff time previously tied up in the manual process - 75 hours a week across two equivalent full-time roles at an assumed £25 per hour - the project has the potential to redirect up to £97,500 of annual staff-time capacity into higher-value work. Against a £5,000 one-off investment, the indicative payback period is less than one month.

"Highway built a practical AI-supported workflow that has dramatically reduced the time involved. Reports and certificates that previously took significant manual effort can now be produced in minutes… The biggest benefit is the time it has given back to the business. Instead of tying people up in repetitive administration, we can now focus more time on new client acquisition and growth."

- Darby Smith, Atman UK

The bigger picture

This wasn't AI for the sake of AI. It was a targeted fix for a real operational problem - one that was quietly capping growth and frustrating both staff and customers.

Atman UK can now take on more clients without its admin burden scaling at the same rate. Its customers get their compliance documentation faster. Its people are doing work that actually moves the business forward. And the workflow creates a foundation for further automation as confidence in the system grows.

Any business running recurring customer contact, manual reporting, compliance certificates or renewal-based workflows may have a very similar opportunity sitting untouched. If you'd like to find out what that could look like for you, get in touch with Highway Business Services to arrange a practical AI process review.