I The Challenge
Each month, the HR team manually created personalized birthday greeting cards using PowerPoint. This process involved multiple repetitive steps:
- Identifying employees with birthdays in the current month from an Excel file
- Collecting employee photographs
- Copying and inserting photographs into PowerPoint slides
- Aligning and formatting images correctly
- Adding employee name and designation
- Copying personalized messages received via email
- Creating individual slides for each employee
This process took approximately 4–5 full working days every month and required constant manual effort. It was repetitive, time-consuming, and prone to formatting inconsistencies.
The Solution
Gentle Reminder developed a custom automation solution that fully automated the greeting card creation process. The system performs the following steps automatically:
- Reads employee birthday data from Excel and identifies birthdays in the current month
- Matches employee photographs using file naming conventions
- Retrieves personalized messages from Outlook email replies based on subject reference
- Automatically generates properly formatted PowerPoint slides
- Inserts photographs, names, designations, and personalized messages
- Ensures consistent layout and formatting for all greeting cards
- Exports the final presentation ready for HR use
Outcome: The entire process now completes in approximately 2 minutes and can be run on demand or scheduled.
The Result
Before automation
- 4–5 days of manual work every month
- High repetitive workload for HR team
- Risk of formatting errors and inconsistencies
After automation
- Fully automated process completed in under 2 minutes
- Eliminated repetitive manual work
- Consistent and professional output
- HR team freed to focus on more valuable activities
Impact & Technology
The automation saved dozens of working hours each month and significantly improved operational efficiency. Following this success, the organization has begun identifying additional processes for automation.