Hanover, 30th May 2016 - On the eve of CeMAT 2016, Toyota Material Handling has announced a new awards programme for the industry, focused on a range of achievements including design, safety and excellence in logistics operations. The first awards are scheduled to coincide with CeMAT 2018.

“Awards programmes are not unusual in our industry” explains Matthias Fischer, President and CEO of Toyota Material Handling Europe, “and we have appreciated the many awards that we have received in recent years. However most of the current award programmes are aimed at companies like ourselves - and we want to do something different, in order to stimulate excellence in logistics operations - recognising people working directly in material handling.”

Full details of the Logiconomi Awards will be announced in the autumn of 2016, when the categories will be revealed. The programme will incorporate the Logistic Design Competition, which was first introduced by Toyota in 2014, to encourage design students to become involved in the logistics industry and inject fresh thinking. A new ‘Engineering Challenge’ award for engineering students is also planned as part of the programme. Additional categories within the Logiconomi Awards will focus on warehouse-floor performance, looking for high levels of safety, productivity and environmental efficiency.

We are able to start to work with truck users to accurately measure performance levels, due to our Smart Dynamics concept, where we use our I_Site technology to collect data for our customers that helps them to understand what is actually happening on the warehouse floor” explains Fischer, “and that means for many categories we can identify top performers in our awards programme based on factual data, rather than subjective judgement. And it would be excellent to include individual truck operators in some categories, based on productivity and safety criteria.”

Other areas of focus for the programme will recognise companies that achieve cost efficiency through innovation and improvements, for example those that effectively take advantage of simple automation to gain fast return on investment, whilst improving the safety and working experience of associated personnel.
The Logiconomi Awards programme takes its name from Toyota’s philosophy for forward-thinking - the combination of excellence in logistics and economy. The awards will be organised and funded by Toyota.