Camera system for real time monitoring of distant locations (to see problem remotely)

Hi all, first of all I'm totally new to this and forgive me if it's not the right place to ask this.

What I want to do: we are a group of people and we are doing a project involving a lot of hardware. The problem is that we are in separate and distant location. When we are trying to solve our problem it's really difficult to do this over the phone without seeing the structure.

I think the solution would be to install a camera system. We have to do real time monitoring. The quality doesn't have to be the best. So I guess a webcam could be an idea?

The problem is, as I told you, I don't know a thing about camera system. I made some research on the net and I found a lot of PC DVR based system. I'm not sure if we need this.

Please, could you point me to a good reference site? Or supplier? We would like to be able to implement a solution as soon as possible. Money is not a problem, we have a good budget. The only thing is that hiring a company is not possible. We have to do the installation ourself.

Thank you a lot for your help.