A practitioner's playbook
Telematics & Fleet Management.
The operating playbook for fleet leaders in emerging markets — visibility, control, safety, and profitability.
The operating playbook for fleet leaders in emerging markets — visibility, control, safety, and profitability.
A transport manager calling drivers one by one to find out who actually left the yard. Fuel slips stacked on the desk, half of them unreadable. Two trucks that will not start. By midday, a vehicle reportedly broken down on the Lagos–Ibadan expressway — and nobody can say with certainty where it is.
This is not a failing operation. It is a typical one. And the book is built around what to do about it.
Fleet managers, transport heads, control-tower controllers, operations leaders responsible for delivery reliability, asset uptime, and cost-per-kilometre across 3PL, FMCG, beverages, oil and gas, mining haulage, courier, or government fleets.
COOs, supply-chain directors, CFOs, and business owners whose vehicles are central to revenue — and who are quietly unsure whether the fleet is generating, protecting, or leaking margin.
Telematics buyers and implementers; consultants; analysts; the next generation of fleet leaders who want to build operations that are not just functional, but intelligent, accountable, and scalable.
A practical playbook built across fifteen years of telematics and logistics operations — written from the seat of the embedded service provider whose teams sit inside the cargo-owner's premises and produce the daily reports that let leadership manage their transporters with independent visibility.
The book is grounded in real engagements — including the twelve-year Guinness Nigeria fleet management programme — and built to be read cover-to-cover by new leaders or referenced chapter-by-chapter by working practitioners.
"Lack of effort is rarely the problem in fleet operations. Lack of evidence almost always is."
Part I — Foundations
"We do not solve the problem. We make it visible enough that the parties who own it can solve it together."
The operating credo
"A modern fleet is not a department. It is an operating system — built bottom-up, in seven layers, over years."
Chapter 27 — The Capstone
A free PDF — the foreword, the introduction, the full first chapter ("Fleet Management & Telematics Foundations"), the first 1,000 words of the Guinness Nigeria case study, and the maturity-model framework. Roughly 40 pages. Enough to know whether the rest of the book is for you.
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MD/CEO, SALCOMMS KWIK XTRA LIMITED · 15+ years in telematics and logistics operations
Shina Salako is the founder and managing director of SALCOMMS KWIK XTRA LIMITED, a telematics service provider whose operating model is built on embedded teams at client sites. SALCOMMS analysts and operators sit inside the cargo-owner's premises, install the tracking devices on every third-party transporter's vehicle before commercial operations begin, and produce the daily business management reports that allow the client's leadership to manage transporter performance with independent visibility.
In 2014 he pioneered and managed Guinness Nigeria's first fleet management programme. Twelve years later, SALCOMMS is still embedded in that operation. SALCOMMS also serves many of the same transporters as direct clients in their own right — a dual relationship that has shaped how this book describes vendor governance, change management, and the long arc of a service-provider relationship.
He is affiliated with PowerFleet, a global telematics platform operating in over fifty countries, and is a certified Maxwell Leadership Team member. Much of this book is written from the seat he has worked in for the last fifteen years — that of the embedded telematics service provider sitting alongside the client's operations team, daily.
A modern fleet is not a department. It is an operating system — deliberate, documented, measurable, built layer by layer. Each layer depends on the stability of the one beneath it.
Build bottom-up. Investing in higher layers before lower layers are stable wastes money — the most common failure mode in this industry, and the one this book is built to help operations avoid.
Honest answers, in ten minutes. The assessment scores your operation against the same seven-layer Fleet Operating System this book builds toward — and tells you, at the end, which layer is holding the others back.
No marketing list. Results sent once. Your data is not shared.
The book is the foundation. The work that follows it sits in three forms. Each is designed for a different conversation a serious fleet operation needs to have at the right moment.
A 60–90 minute keynote — "Building the Fleet Operating System: What twelve years at Guinness Nigeria taught us" — for executive audiences, industry conferences, board offsites, and strategy retreats. International and West African engagements.
Enquire about speaking →Six-week practitioner cohorts for fleet management teams, control towers, and operations leadership — Cargo-Owner and Transporter programmes, plus in-house cohorts for organisations training eight or more from one team.
See the training programmes →Start with the free 10-minute self-diagnostic, then deepen into a 10-day written assessment of your fleet against the seven-layer FOS. Most engagements continue into SALCOMMS's embedded telematics service — our team sits inside your premises, produces the daily reports, and partners with your leadership.
Take the free self-diagnostic →The book exists to make a difficult conversation easier. Read it. If what's in it matches the operation you are running — or trying to build — talk to us.
