Extreme Scaffolding Job, Costing & Inspection System

Extreme Scaffolding is a large, established scaffolding & access contractor (turnover ~£3.6m), delivering everything from small domestic scaffolds to large commercial contracts exceeding £250,000. With an aim of steady growth through new customers and repeat business, the company needed a reliable internal system that could evolve with them — not slow them down.

New Media Aid was brought in to replace a fragile legacy platform and deliver a robust, bespoke system to manage clients, quotes, jobs, invoicing, staff allocation, labour costs and inspections.

The challenge

Extreme Scaffolding were using an ageing PHP system with a MySQL database for day-to-day operations. Over time the codebase had been amended by multiple developers, which led to a familiar pattern: even small changes triggered unforeseen bugs, regressions and weeks of disruption.

• Small amendments were high-risk and time-consuming
• Multiple “fixes” over the years had made the code harder to trust
• The system no longer matched how the business actually operated
• Growth and process improvements were being held back by technical debt

After reviewing the situation, it became clear that continuing to patch the existing platform would be riskier and more expensive than a controlled redevelopment on a clean foundation.

The approach

The decision was made to rebuild from scratch, keeping the parts that worked for staff while replacing the fragile core with a structured architecture that could be safely extended over time.

The priority was practical: deliver a stable system that the team could rely on, and that could support incremental improvements without introducing unexpected breakages.

What was delivered

Centralised operations: clients, quotes, jobs and invoicing

• Single system for customer records, quotations, job tracking and invoicing
• Clear job lifecycle from quote to completion
• Reduced duplicated data and admin overhead

Staff allocation and labour costing

• Assign staff to jobs and track labour at job level
• Capture labour costs to improve profitability visibility
• Support for evolving reporting as the business grew

Integrated inspection system

• Inspection records linked directly to jobs
• Consistent inspection logging and audit trail
• Improved compliance workflow with less manual effort

Built for safe change

• New features could be added predictably without destabilising the platform
• Amendments became manageable rather than high-risk “code archaeology”
• A foundation designed to support steady operational growth

The outcome

The redevelopment gave Extreme Scaffolding a dependable operational backbone:

• Fewer unexpected bugs and far less disruption when changes were required
• Better visibility of job labour costs and overall job profitability
• Improved inspection recording integrated into day-to-day workflows
• A system that supported growth rather than constraining it

Most importantly, the business was no longer dependent on a fragile legacy codebase where even minor changes carried disproportionate risk.

A note on technology choices

This platform was originally delivered several years ago, at a time when ASP.NET WebForms was still widely used for internal line-of-business applications. The key outcome was replacing an unmaintainable PHP/MySQL system with a structured, dependable platform that could be extended safely.

If commissioned today, the same system would be delivered using modern .NET Core / Razor Pages, reflecting how tooling and best practices have evolved — with an even cleaner separation of concerns and an easier upgrade path. What hasn’t changed is the approach: understand the workflow first, then build a system around how the business actually runs.