Toyota Material Handling Europe Celebrates 'European Week for Safety and Health at Work'
Toyota Material Handling Europe (TMHE) continually strives towards a safer and more productive working environment. In honour of the 'European Week for Safety and Health at Work', TMHE discusses activities it has recently undertaken to improve safe maintenance and safety awareness in the material handling industry.
- (1888PressRelease) October 28, 2011 - Toyota Material Handling Europe celebrates 'European Week for Safety and Health at Work' with a review of the 200 safety actions taken in its network
As the 'European Week for Safety and Health at Work' begins, Toyota Material Handling Europe (TMHE), Europe's leading material handling equipment supplier, looks back at some of the activities it has recently undertaken to improve safety in material handling.
As the official campaign partner of EU-OSHA's 'Healthy Workplaces' campaign, Toyota Material Handling Europe (TMHE) has been using the past year to review and ramp up its safety activities. It has also been working hard to share its best practices on safety across Europe - both with its own employees and with the industry in general. In total, the company and its local network have undertaken over 200 separate activities during the last 12 months. TMHE's focus on safety will continue with the release of a new mobile game for forklift drivers - an interactive 'app' for smartphones and tablet computers that will help boost drivers' awareness of safety issues.
A full year of local awareness campaigns: Safety first in manufacturing and maintenance
Safe maintenance is central to TMHE's business. Each of its three production centres (Sweden, France, andItaly) has a 'Safety Dojo', where more than 2,250 factory employees receive detailed safety training. (In Japanese, dojo is the area within a school where formal training is conducted). As part of its partnership with EU-OSHA on 'Healthy Workplaces', TMHE has now included materials about safe maintenance in the Safety Dojos' training activities.
TMHE's 4,500 service engineers, meanwhile, receive safety training through the company's Service Technician Education Program (STEP). The training organisation within TMHE's Service Market department is now updating the program to include the five key recommendations for safe maintenance put forward by EU-OSHA: Plan; Make it safe; Use the appropriate equipment; Work as planned; Final control.
With 3.5 million service visits made by TMHE every year, implementing these safety policies will mean greater protection not only for TMHE's service engineers but also for customers' valuable investments in material handling equipment.
Local Toyota Material Handling companies have also undertaken their own promotional activities to encourage key stakeholders to take action on safe maintenance. In France, for example, Toyota distributor CFM successfully organised a "Safety Day" to share best practices on safety with its own employees, customers, as well as the industry. The event led four large enterprises to immediately start working more closely with CFM. In the Czech Republic, as in many other countries, TMH collaborated closely with EU-OSHA's local focal points to promote the benefits of safe maintenance more widely. Meanwhile, in Germany, the TMH team took the 'Safe Maintenance' campaign and Safety Dojo to CeMAT 2011, the industry's biggest trade fair.
Looking at alternative ways of safety promotion
The focus of these continuing activities is to raise awareness about the benefits of better safety - and also the cost of getting it wrong. As part of this, TMHE will soon launch a mobile game called 'Forklift Challenge'. This digital 'app' was first presented at the CeMAT trade fair in Germany this year, where the company used it to demonstrate the benefits of Toyota SAS to customers. TMHE also took the opportunity to showcase the Toyota Tonero driving simulator which allows visitors to experience the types of safety-related challenges that forklift drivers experience in daily life. The Toyota Tonero driving simulator will be shown in different fairs throughout Europe.
Full support of the TMHE organisation for future initiatives
"When it comes to safety, prevention is always better than cure," says Håkan Dahllöf, President of TMHE. "Toyota Material Handling Europe has consistently put safety first in its manufacturing and service operations. The health and safety of our employees and those who use our products is central to our commitment to being a reliable business partner and a responsible member of society. In our partnership with EU-OSHA's 'Safe Maintenance' campaign, we will continue to support the EU-OSHA safety initiative as a way of helping us all be safer together."
About the European Week of Safety and Health at Work
The 'European Week of Safety and Health at Work' runs 24 October - 28 October 2011 and focuses on safe maintenance. The week is part of the 'Healthy Workplaces' Europe-wide campaign for 2010-2011 by the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA), which aims to promote safe and healthy workplaces by encouraging an integrated and structured approach to maintenance.
For more information about TMHE's partnership with EU-OSHA, please visit http://safety.toyota-forklifts.eu
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