Quickbase helps us save 10+ hours weekly and arm field teams with valuable, real-time data to make their jobs easier.
At Vumacam, we make sure our internal processes run as smoothly as our camera network.
That’s a big job. We operate a smart surveillance network of more than 15,000 cameras that helps private security teams and cities in South Africa reduce crime and keep people safe. We do it with a lean crew (about 100 people) so every minute and every process must count.
When we were small, we lived in spreadsheets like everyone else. As we grew from a few hundred poles to 15,000 cameras, those spreadsheets turned into data silos and slow, error-prone workflows. We needed a single source of truth that could scale without doubling our headcount. For us, that became Quickbase.
One connected system from sale to live camera
Everything runs through our Quickbase apps. They’re not isolated tools; they’re a connected ecosystem. A single camera’s journey touches almost every app we’ve built:
1. Sales Manager app
Projects start here. When the sales team signs a contract, customer details, opportunity notes and contract terms go into one clean record. It's a single source of truth that we trust.
2. Plan & Build app
After a sale, the record flows into Plan & Build. Operations plans the physical asset rollout here: exact pole location, permits and permissions, resources, and costs. That planning step used to be a handoff full of emails and attachments; now it’s a structured, auditable process.
3. Service Delivery (asset) app
As we build the pole and attach hardware, we create the asset record in our V3 app. Every camera, pole and router gets its own record and lifecycle: Installed → Configured → Live. We link assets to companies, to feeds, and to downstream processes.
4. Support & Maintenance app
This is where the magic happens. We integrate Quickbase with Zabbix, our network monitoring tool. Every few minutes all 15,000+ devices ping Zabbix. If a camera misses a ping (because of a dirty lens, a bumped pole, or any other issue), Zabbix flags it and pushes an event into Quickbase. That event creates a maintenance ticket with full asset context. Our support team sees the ticket with everything they need — no hopping between systems. Armand, our head of service delivery, says this gives maintenance crews real-time info in their hands.
Build fast, without being a coder
What changed everything for us was the ability to build our own tools. Our core engineering team focuses on camera software — they don’t have time to build every internal process. Quickbase lets the people doing the work build the tools they need.
We used to spend 40 minutes on a complicated manual process to onboard a site — adding multiple records across several tables. We built a pipeline in Quickbase to automate it. Now we open one form, tick a box, and Quickbase generates all necessary records across apps. That 40-minute task now takes 10 minutes — a 75% time saving per site. For someone doing 20 sites a week, that’s over 10 hours saved every week.
Major impact
Aside from saving so much time, our ability to build and automate has had a massive impact across the business:
- Saved headcount — we avoided hiring 1–2 additional admins thanks to automation.
- Scalable operations — we grew from 200 poles to 15,000 cameras without breaking processes.
- Faster fixes, less downtime — Zabbix → Quickbase routing finds issues and gets them to the right team instantly.
What’s next
We’re not done. We’re also exploring integrations with local municipalities so our processes can plug directly into city systems and increase public safety impact.
Quickbase isn’t just a database for us — it’s the engine that lets a small, focused team do great things, not only for Vumacam, but for our local communities as well.