Built by People Who Lived
the Problem — and Decided
to Build the Solution.
QBaticEPM3 did not come from a product roadmap or a market gap analysis. It came from years of working inside construction projects across southern Africa and watching the same thing happen, job after job — good teams, solid work, and margins that quietly disappeared between the estimate and the final account. Wim Lubbe and Riaan van Zyl had both spent enough time on that problem to stop waiting for someone else to solve it.
The problem was not the projects.
It was the knowledge that disappeared when they ended.
Wim Lubbe and Riaan van Zyl spent years working in construction and engineering across southern Africa before they started talking seriously about building something together. What kept coming up in those conversations was not the complexity of the projects — it was how much of what teams learned on one job simply failed to carry over to the next. Projects won at decent margins finished below them. Not usually because of bad work. More often because the right information arrived too late, or not at all.
Cost figures turned up weeks after the money was spent. Variations got priced after the crew had already done the work. And when a senior estimator or project manager moved on, the knowledge they had built up — rates, supplier intelligence, lessons from three hard jobs in difficult ground — went with them. The next person started from scratch. The organisation did not get smarter. It just cycled through the same expensive discoveries on repeat.
They looked at every tool available. Estimating software, project trackers, ERP systems, maintenance platforms. Each one handled a piece of the picture. None of them were designed to talk to each other in any meaningful way. What the estimating team built never reliably reached the project controls team. What the project team knew at handover never reached the people running maintenance. The knowledge existed, in fragments, across systems that were never intended to share it.
"We weren't trying to build a software company. We were trying to fix something that had been wrong for a long time and nobody had bothered to fix properly."
The question they kept landing on was a simple one. Why does a company that has built fifty roads not have a better grasp of the fifty-first than it did of the first? The knowledge was there. It had been earned, expensively, on every job before this one. It just had nowhere to go when the job was done.
QBaticEPM3 is the answer they built. Not a smarter estimating tool, not a faster way to track programmes — a single environment where what a company learns on one project actually carries forward to the next. That was the idea. Everything else followed from it.
Two founders.
One shared conviction.
Mr. Wim Lubbe
Co-Founder QBaticEPM3Windhoek, Namibia
Wim's problem with the existing tools
was not that they were bad.
It was that they were each solving a different part
of the same problem.
Wim Lubbe is a software developer by background — and that perspective changed how he looked at the problem the construction and infrastructure industry kept describing to him. He had built integrations. He knew what they cost to maintain, how they degraded over time, and how they created the illusion of a connected system without ever producing a genuinely unified one. Every time an estimating tool tried to talk to a project tracker, or a project tracker tried to hand data to a financial system, the result was a fragile bridge between two things that had never been designed to share a common language.
His view — which grew from direct technical experience rather than from frustration with the tools as a user — was that the integration approach was the wrong answer by design. The problem was not that existing systems were poorly connected. It was that they had been built with fundamentally different assumptions about what the data was for. An estimating tool thinks about cost at the component level. A financial system thinks about cost at the ledger level. A maintenance platform thinks about cost at the asset level. No integration layer can reconcile that cleanly, because the mismatch is not in the connectors. It is in the models underneath them.
So Wim built a single data model instead. Not two systems connected by an API. Not a reporting layer on top of separate operational tools. One schema where the estimate, the project, and the asset maintenance programme live in the same place and share the same underlying structure from day one. The knowledge built during estimation governs execution. The same data that drives execution anchors the maintenance record years later. Nothing gets translated. Nothing gets rebuilt. That is not a design philosophy. It is the direct result of a developer deciding that the integration problem was not worth solving because it should not exist in the first place.
"The industry had accepted that fragmented systems were just the price of complexity. We didn't think that was true. One data model isn't a luxury — it's the only thing that makes compounding knowledge structurally possible."
Mr. Riaan van Zyl
Co-Founder QBaticEPM3Windhoek, Namibia
Riaan spent years inside the problem
before he and Wim sat down to figure out
how to build a system that could fix it.
Riaan van Zyl's career was in and around construction and infrastructure projects across southern Africa. Not in technology. In the field, in the commercial office, in the conversations where project margins were defended or conceded. What that experience gave him was a very precise understanding of where the pain lived — not in abstract terms, but in the specific, expensive, repeating moments where information arrived too late, knowledge walked out the door, and a project that should have been profitable finished below its price for reasons that were entirely preventable.
The thing that stuck with him was how much of this was fixable. The knowledge to prevent these problems existed inside the organisations experiencing them — in the heads of experienced people, in old job files, in rate schedules that had been calibrated against real performance over years. What was missing was somewhere for it to live that wasn't dependent on a specific person still being around. Teams built real expertise on hard jobs and then watched it scatter the moment the project closed or someone moved on. The company ran the next one slightly blind all over again.
That was the problem Riaan brought when he and Wim started talking seriously about building something. Not a better contract management tool. Not a fancier dashboard. He understood the problem from years of living inside it. Wim understood how to build a system that could actually fix it. The combination of those two perspectives is what QBaticEPM3 is.
"A company that builds its fiftieth project without the knowledge from the first forty-nine isn't growing. It's just repeating itself, forty-nine times, and calling that experience."
What we refused to compromise
while building it.
QBaticEPM3 is a direct reflection of what Wim and Riaan decided they were and weren't willing to build. They had seen enough of how the industry actually works to have strong views about what it needed — and equally strong views about the things that sounded useful but tended to make the underlying problem worse.
Every decision about the platform — what to include, what to leave out, how data should flow between phases — was tested against the same set of questions. Does this make the organisation smarter? Does this keep the knowledge where it belongs? Does this serve someone actually doing the work, or does it serve a report that someone will read once and file away? The platform that came out of that process is deliberately opinionated. They are comfortable with that.
- Knowledge built on a project belongs to the organisation permanently — not to the individual who developed it
- A cost that cannot be traced to the activity that generated it is not financial data — it is financial noise
- The estimate that wins the contract and the budget that governs the project must be the same document
- Asset maintenance begins at the moment of commissioning — not when the construction contractor leaves site
- Every completed project must make the next one more accurate — not just more experienced
- Enterprise intelligence should not require enterprise scale to access — a one-person operation deserves the same structural advantage as a multinational
The same problem, in different places
Working independently across the southern African construction and engineering sector, Wim and Riaan keep finding the same thing — organisations losing knowledge at the end of every project and starting the next one less equipped than they should be. The problem is not specific to one company or one sector. It is structural.
Deciding what not to build
After looking seriously at every available tool, Wim concludes that integrating existing systems will not work. The problem is in the architecture, not the connections. He begins designing a single data model that can hold estimation, execution, and maintenance together without translation layers or synchronisation logic — the technical foundation that would become QBaticEPM3.
QBatic is founded in Windhoek
Wim and Riaan co-found QBatic with one mandate: build the platform that turns project knowledge into permanent institutional capital. Not a better estimating tool. Not a faster project tracker. A complete knowledge infrastructure for the infrastructure industry.
QBaticEPM3 — the full lifecycle platform
QBaticEPM3 serves infrastructure owners, EPC contractors, operators, and solo specialists across twelve sectors — from housing to pipeline integrity management — with a single governed environment that follows every project from first estimate to final maintenance cycle.
An industry where every organisation
gets measurably smarter
with every project it delivers.
Construction and engineering companies have delivered some of the hardest, most technically demanding work imaginable — bridges, dams, pipelines, power grids, things that actually hold the world together. And most of them have done it while losing a significant portion of what they learned along the way. Not through negligence. There simply was never a system designed to hold that knowledge and carry it forward in a useful form.
That is the thing Wim and Riaan are trying to change. Not how projects are managed week to week — though QBaticEPM3 does that too. The deeper change: that when a job ends, the company is genuinely better positioned for the next one than it was when this one started. That the knowledge earned on hard ground stays in the organisation. That the people who come next inherit something real, not just a handover file and a set of as-built drawings nobody will look at again.
Ready to see what they built?
Request a briefing and let us show you how QBaticEPM3 addresses the specific challenge your organisation is facing — prepared before we speak.