How Vumacam Deploys and Tracks 15,000+ Assets with Quickbase

Company Overview 

Vumacam, a South Africa–based company under the Vumatel/MASSIVE Group, builds and operates smart surveillance infrastructure that delivers reliable, compliant video feeds to private security companies and municipal partners across Johannesburg and surrounding areas. Today, the network spans more than 15,000 cameras, providing real-time monitoring and actionable data that help reduce crime and improve public safety. 

Despite its scale, Vumacam runs a compact team of roughly 100 people. A focused engineering group supports a larger delivery organization, while Quickbase acts as the single source of truth for sales, provisioning, maintenance, and governance. The platform enables non-technical staff to streamline workflows, automate repetitive tasks, and maintain fast, auditable operations as the business grows.

Challenge 

As Vumacam’s network grew, the company needed to scale responsibly, not just add cameras. Existing processes relied heavily on Excel spreadsheets, which created silos and slowed down processes. The impact was far-reaching:  

• Spreadsheets, manual handoffs, and ad hoc tools couldn’t scale or support complex asset tracking, billing, or service delivery.  
• Without real-time visibility into uptime and ticket resolution, outages and service requests slipped through the cracks, delaying resolution and eroding customer trust. They didn’t have a centralized platform that had compliant data connecting sales, planning, and service, making it even harder to stay aligned and responsive.  
• Engineering was focused on core product development and couldn’t support every internal app or workflow request, creating a capacity bottleneck. 

These constraints caused more human error and threatened Vumacam’s ability to scale without substantial hiring.

Solution: Quickbase as a Single Source of Truth 

To scale responsibly from a few hundred poles to 15,000+ cameras, Vumacam needed faster, repeatable, and auditable processes. Quickbase became Vumacam’s central operating platform, unifying sales, planning, service delivery, support, and governance into one auditable system that non-technical staff can use. Quickbase rules asset tracking for Vumacam. Every camera, pole, router, and in-dome device is a hardware record with geo-location, configuration, lifecycle status, owner, feed assignment, and invoices — all tracked end-to-end and linked to commercial and operational workflows. 

Core Quickbase Apps: 

• Sales Manager App — Connects contracts and partner entitlements directly to asset records and feed allocations, making commercial terms and billing traceable to each camera. 
• Plan & Build App — Manages planning, site provisioning, wayleaves, and capacity tracking using geo-tagged data and costing to ensure new installs align with actual network capacity. 
• Service Delivery Apps — Tracks camera onboarding, configuration, and lifecycle (e.g., installed → configured → live), including config histories and software activation logs. 
• Support & Maintenance App — Integrated with Zabbix NMS for automated ticketing. Missed pings or errors trigger events that generate maintenance tickets with full asset context. 
• Governance & Audit — Provides role-based access and audit trails that are compliant with South Africa’s personal information laws, ensuring secure and traceable management of every asset and feed. 

Why this matters: Centralizing asset attributes (location, config, lifecycle, tickets, bills) turned camera tracking from a manual spreadsheet task into a verifiable workflow, enabling faster rollouts, fewer configuration errors, and cleaner billing. 

How Asset Tracking Works 

With Quickbase, handoffs at Vumacam are now automatic. When a sale comes in, the details flow straight into planning and service delivery, no missed steps. Here’s a quick look at how it works: 

1. Devices ping the monitoring system every few minutes. 

2. Zabbix flags failures or missed pings and pushes an event into Quickbase (V3 app).

3. Quickbase creates an event record and auto-escalates it into a maintenance ticket that includes the asset’s full context. 

4. Field teams act on the ticket; when resolved, a pipeline/webhook updates Zabbix so both systems stay in sync. 

5. APIs/pipelines also push configuration and activation commands as devices move through lifecycle states, removing manual handoffs.

Quickbase’s low-code flexibility lets non-technical teams build and update workflows quickly, enabling fast fixes, smooth onboarding, and consistent operations post-acquisition.

The Quickbase Impact 

Vumacam saw measurable wins by scaling their operations with Quickbase, not only unlocking time and money savings, but boosting team morale by eliminating clunky processes.  

Time Savings 

• Camera onboarding cut from 40 minutes to 10 per site (a 75% improvement). 
• On projects with 20 sites per week, that’s 10+ hours saved weekly — for just one user. 

Headcount Efficiency 

• Automation through Pipelines eliminates the need to hire 1–2 extra admin roles. 
• Vumacam saves on overhead costs, including recruiting, onboarding, and managing new staff. 

Scalability Without Stress 

• Growth from 200 poles to 15,000+ cameras without breaking processes. 
• Quickbase apps are customizable and scalable.  

Cost Avoidance 

• No need for a large dev team; business analysts build apps themselves. 
• Workflows that once took weeks were now built in hours. 

Reliability & Uptime 

• Direct Zabbix integration flags issues instantly and routes them to the right team. 
• Stable, always-on system minimizes business risk. 

Employee Wins 

• Quickbase training and certifications helped employees like Lindy build new skills and advance in their careers.