St1 strengthened its international safety management by combining Power BI with Azure OpenAI: observations are translated into English automatically and critical events reach management within 24 hours — across language barriers.
The technical cornerstones of the solution
Azure OpenAI integration
Azure OpenAI automatically converts the descriptions of safety observations into English, enabling fast multilingual communication across the organization.
Power BI Incremental Refresh
The efficient storage and management of translations is ensured with Power BI's Incremental Refresh functionality, which makes the solution cost-effective and scalable.
Power Automate alerting system
The automated alerting system sends email notifications twice a day and ensures that critical safety events reach designated leaders within a 24-hour window.
Overview
BI-Asiantuntijat delivered an innovative Power BI solution for St1 that combines AI and Power BI automation to strengthen international safety management. The project was launched in the Finnish operations, where the solution brings new transparency and efficiency to cross-border safety communication.
"I am extremely pleased with what the project delivered. Using Power BI in safety reporting has brought efficiency and time savings in producing reports. The AI-powered translations provide clear, near real-time visibility into defined safety deviations across country borders throughout the entire organization." Sami Strandman Training and HSSE Manager, St1The challenges of safety communication in an international operating environment
In St1's international operating environment, streamlining safety communication and ensuring its timeliness was identified as an important area for development. Information about serious safety events had to reach group management within 24 hours of the event. A particular challenge was translating events reported in different languages into English and delivering the information within a tight time limit. Carried out manually, the process would have been extremely laborious and time-consuming.
Power BI and AI remove language barriers from communication
BI-Asiantuntijat developed an English-language Power BI report that combines the capabilities of large language models via Azure OpenAI with Power BI analytics applied to safety data from the Falcony system. Data collection can be carried out in any language, after which the AI automatically translates the events into English on the report.
Onni Kultalahti, Manager, Automation Technology at St1, played a key role in delivering the project. His expertise in leveraging automation and AI made it possible to integrate the solution seamlessly into St1's systems. In particular, Kultalahti's contribution to applying AI and developing the prompts was significant to the project's success.
The technical features of the solution
The Power BI report focuses on the most serious safety events, and the report's alerts are triggered twice a day — in the morning and in the afternoon. The alerts launch a Power Automate workflow that delivers information about the events to designated leaders by email.
In addition, thanks to the incremental refresh functionality, the translations are saved and preserved regardless of the report refresh. This makes leveraging AI cost-effective.
Power BI, AI and automation deliver significant benefits
The new solution has brought St1 significant advantages:
- Company management stays informed in real time about safety deviations occurring at the grassroots level
- Meeting tight deadlines in safety communication
- A cost-effective and scalable implementation
- Systematic documentation and trend analysis of serious events
- Enhanced data-driven management and monitoring of the impact of measures
"Combining AI and Power BI has opened up entirely new possibilities in analytics. In this project we saw how natural language processing takes reporting to a whole new level. Leveraging AI in Power BI is only just beginning — in addition to language translations, we can in the future produce, for example, automatic summaries, categorizations and scorings. The possibilities are almost limitless." – Amira Achek, CEO of BI-Asiantuntijat
The collaboration with St1 continues, including in the further development of safety reporting.