NR12 impacts in the industrial maintenance

NR12, the brazilian regulatory standard that deals with safety at work on machinery, establishes measures that contribute to a safer and more effective operation of industrial equipment.   

Among the norm’s objectives are collective protection, individual protection, and work administration and organization, ensuring greater worker safety, better conditions for operating machinery and equipment, and safer environments.

Check below some items of the standard that directly impact the improvement of maintenance management and the safety of industry workers.   

Maintenance Periodicity

In the first item of this section, the norm emphasizes the need to maintain the frequency of maintenance according to the applicable technical standards. 

The second item gives more details about the frequency of maintenance involving items that influence safety.

According to the text: 

12.11.2.2

“Maintenance of items that influence safety should:  

a) in the case of preventive measures, it should have an execution schedule;  

b) in the case of the predictive, it should have a description of the analysis techniques and centralized supervision or sampling means”. 

Machinery Replacement

In the fifth article, the norm presents details about the case of replacing operating machines that have potentially dangerous failures.   

12.11.5

“In the machinery and equipment maintenance, whenever any defect in a part or component that compromises safety is detected, its immediate repair or replacement with another original or equivalent part or component must be provided, so as to guarantee the same characteristics and safe conditions of use.” 

Security

Defining the safety zones within the industrial plant is one of the practices established by NR12, where the minimum safety distance between the equipment and the operator must be observed. This distance must follow the recommendations indicated in the appendixes of the norm and the manufacturer’s recommendations.

Signaling

As for signaling, the machines and equipment must be properly signalized in order to warn workers about the risks related to the nature and use of these machines and equipment. The signaling can be visual or audible, as long as it effectively communicates the danger to which the workers are exposed to, so that their safety and physical integrity is maintained.  

Records

In addition to being performed, all maintenance must be recorded and must be available for consultation, as the article states:

12.11.2.1

“The maintenance record must be made available to the workers involved in the operation, maintenance, and repairs, as well as to the Internal Commission for the Prevention of Accidents – CIPA, the Safety and Occupational Medicine Service – SESMT, and the Fiscal Audit of Labor.” 

Measurements and Procedures

The norms’ objectives are clear and described below:

Collective protection measures: Implementation of fixed physical protections when in risk areas.

Individual protection measures: Use of individual protection equipment (PPE) during the workday.

Administrative measures: Use of effective safety systems and protective measures, in which employees must be aligned and trained. Training must be periodic and properly documented. They also involve the adoption of a preventive maintenance policy of the equipment by the company.

Some basic procedures are required in the norm, such as: machine inventory, risk analysis, diagnostics, and machine operation and maintenance manual in Portuguese.

Investing in measures which ensure that your industry complies with NR12, avoiding serious accidents and unscheduled stops that can generate losses for the entire production line is in accordance with these technical standards and meets Dynamox’s purpose, “Safety for people. Reliability and predictability for assets”.

Check how the Dynamox Solution can contribute with the implementation of NR12 and in the improvement of your industrial maintenance plan.