The Point to Point Transport Commission conducts regular safety audits to ensure a service provider’s Safety Management System (SMS) meets the safety standards in the Regulation.
Taxis Limousines Buses Group (TLB Group) recently completed a safety audit and achieved excellent results. We spoke with Selim Lok, Manager at TLB Group, to find out how they developed their Safety Management System and what the audit experience was like.
Q: Can you tell me about your organisation?
TLB Group is a small car service business that caters for all ground transportation needs within all the major cities within Australia. In a nutshell, we like to tell our clients that we do everything in relation to transportation other than helicopters and planes!
The business started around thirteen years ago when I started driving taxis on the weekends just to earn some extra money, In addition to my full time job. I enjoyed driving so much and networking with passengers that needed to travel regularly, I would give my business card to the clients to have them call me directly when they next needed a cab. Six months later, I resigned from my full time job and bought my first taxi which back then was a Lime Taxi.
Word of mouth being a strong marketing tool, I was swamped with bookings from new clients who travel regularly. I needed to grow my boutique fleet to cater for the services that were needed. To date, I operate a fleet of eight vehicles ranging from sedans, wagons, SUVs vans and mini-buses. Having a strong affiliated network of over 200 driver/operators, our coverage spans throughout Australia and our capabilities of servicing multiple bookings simultaneously allows us to give our clients the assurance they need in today’s world.
In summary, we have grown to offer our clients five boutique and niche brands within the transportation sector which enables us to cater for all the ground transport needs within today’s society.
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Q. How did you develop your SMS? Were there any specific challenges you came across?
Being in the industry for over thirteen years, I have worked within the taxi, limousines and bus sectors. This allows me to get key and critical information from those operations, to now form a SMS that best suits the current business I'm operating.
Along the way there were multiple challenges I faced but working together with officials and networks, I have overcome them to better service the clients and drivers to make it a safer place for all.
The biggest challenge I faced, and learnt from, was when I operated multiple wheelchair accessible taxis.
Due to being a specialised taxi service, I had to always be on my toes to ensure that the safety of our clients as well as our drivers was the highest priority.
Q. What was the audit experience like?
The audit experience was great. To be honest at first I was very intimidated when getting the audit notice in the mail and I immediately questioned it…"why me?” “why so soon?”
When I spoke to Ben (Auditor), he advised that it was going to be a consultative audit… and that’s exactly what it was. Not once did I have that intimidated feeling which I first had when receiving the audit letter. In fact the few hours during the process it was a learning experience and we were bouncing thoughts and ideas off each other which I came out better understanding the key aspects of SMS within our industry.
For further information see the Safety Audit factsheet and the Safety Audit Tool.