Best practice advice offered in Taking Care with Toyota campaign

The objective of the Taking Care with Toyota campaign was always to help companies operating materials handling equipment by sharing best practice and knowledge.

By providing free resources like the manual handling guide, forklift safety guide and training best practice posters, we have provided companies simple safety information, practical tips /advice and visual reminders for the whole team. In addition, we have encouraged all of our team members throughout the organisation to share knowledge with regards to subjects like TPS (Toyota Production System), safety legislation, Thorough Examination and the benefits of good operator training. At Toyota our mission to is to be a partner to our customers and we can only do that by providing support and advice to help them be successful.

We feel that Taking Care with Toyota has been a success, which is why we have chosen to extend it into 2013. We have had over 500 companies going to our website to request free resources and sign up to our newsletters which shows that safety is something that is very important to them. Many companies are also regularly checking the free resources page to see what is new and request additional copies. This interaction with customers is the true measure of the success.

The free resources are just one element of Taking Care with Toyota. Over the last year we have also attended over 30 events including regional health and safety shows, regional shows, national exhibitions and networking events. Taking Care with Toyota has been a key theme at these events and our teams have been on hand to talk to visitors about how Toyota can help them, not only in terms of providing safe equipment, but also to reduce manual handling and provide quality training and advice.

Taking Care with Toyota has also been about providing our teams with tools and information so they can help the customers they see on a day-to-day basis.

We have provided information about safety in our internal newsletters, improved our quality-safety boards in depots and provided all free resources for sales and service to use when meeting customers.

From talking to our customers we know that there is still more we can do with the campaign. Taking Care with Toyota was about demonstrating to companies that safety is about three things: the right products for the job, training for people and creating a culture of safety through the processes that you put in place.

We believe that to do this you have to work with all stakeholders involved in materials handling including buyers, health and safety, supervisors and end users, and we have tried to do this through various methods. We have provided TPS training to hundreds of managers (both internal and external) looking at tools like Kaizen and 5S.

These tools can be applied to all businesses and can help to create a culture that supports safe working.

We will continue to provide best practice advice to all these groups by developing our resources to new product areas and developing our Toyota Knowledgebase newsletter to share business knowledge.

As a leader in the industry, we are committed to offering as much support as we can to help companies to make their materials handling operations safer, but also more productive.

In addition, all the countries who are part of Toyota Material Handling Europe have been working with EU-OSHA since 2011. In the first year, the campaign was related to safe maintenance and we worked strongly with our 500 strong service team to ensure that we were communicating the risks and best practice internally.

This year the campaign is focused on risk prevention through leadership and worker participation, which complements the Taking Care with Toyota campaign in the UK. EU-OSHA have provided us with some great general safety information and we are working to incorporate that into our resources.