CAE: Transforming global communications while saving time
About CAE
CAE Inc. is a Canadian multinational company specializing in cutting-edge training, simulation, and critical operations solutions, with a presence in over 40 countries and a workforce of approximately 13,000 employees.
Founded in 1947 by Ken Patrick, a former Royal Canadian Air Force officer, CAE is headquartered in Saint-Laurent, Quebec, Canada. The company is publicly traded on both the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: CAE) and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: CAE), with a reported revenue of $4.7 billion in fiscal year 2025.
Employees operate across different time zones, environments, and missions, so ensuring consistent, engaging communication across the board is essential.
The challenge
A core communication channel for CAE is its long-running global weekly newsletter, which is designed to surface human stories, highlight major initiatives, and ensure teams stay connected across the organization’s highly complex structure.
For years, CAE produced this newsletter via a point employee communications app (ECA) vendor, relying on a cumbersome and heavily manual workflow which consumed significant team resources.
For example, even if an article had been published on CAE’s intranet (‘360’), it then had to be duplicated for the newsletter article, with images, links, and other elements needing to be added in manually.
In addition, because full stories were often included within an email itself, employees weren’t visiting the intranet, limiting opportunities for deeper engagement and exploration. The ROI of the investment simply wasn’t being realized.
The solution: A unified, automated EXP
CAE wanted the newsletter to be a gateway, rather than an endpoint. Crucially, they needed it to better serve their need of aligning employees who are dispersed across training centers, plants, aircraft hangers, and corporate offices.
The business began to look for a faster, more agile, and more efficient tool. Unily’s award-winning employee experience platform (the first platform to be named a Leader by all three analysts, Gartner, Forrester, and IDC), was adopted to transform the global newsletter. This included the use of Broadcast Email as the capability to deliver automated, personalized newsletters.
Spotlight: Automating to elevate
The most significant shift came from automation. Whereas the previous vendor required manual recreation of every story, Broadcast Center enables CAE to pull stories directly from the EXP, using simple code-based automation.
This has:
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Created a single source of truth: content is authored once on 360 and automatically appears in the newsletter
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Removed duplication: no longer do teams need to rewrite titles, descriptions, or upload images twice
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Delivered true integration: there is now a better link between email and intranet, with one being used to serve the other
What previously took 25–30 hours a week now takes CAE only a few hours.
CAE measured the reduction and revealed a time saving of 80%. This has been transformational: instead of spending the week formatting newsletters, the Communications team can now focus on storytelling, alignment, and engagement.
Spotlight: Driving employees from email to EXP
The CAE communications team also wanted to simplify tools and consolidate channels. App sprawl has become a consistent problem for enterprises in recent years – Unily’s whitepaper on the future of work reveals that the average number of apps a business has is over 100 – which rises to 247 for companies with 2,000 employees or more. In addition, it shows that nearly 60% of employees feel digital tools add to their workplace stress.
By sending the newsletter directly from Unily – the same platform where employees read full stories – CAE created a more cohesive and streamlined user journey. Employees can now easily access related content with consistent branding and UX across channels.
Because newsletters now link employees directly to 360, CAE's intranet, the team have seen a measurable lift in engagement. From August–October 2024, click rates increased 12% year-over-year, indicating that employees were not only reading but actively exploring more content.
This shift demonstrates the success of CAE’s goal to drive employees from email into the EXP for deeper interaction.
Spotlight: Utilizing templates to turbocharge publishing
Unily provides a range of pre-configured publishing templates, to help content authors and internal communicators create engaging, on-brand content – at speed and scale.
This no-code approach includes a seamless drag-and-drop design, and removes the need for either technical knowledge or design resource. CAE uses a structured format with flexible sections that can be adjusted each week. As a result, the newsletter always looks polished and professionally branded.
Communications Advisor Aziza Bouhejba describes Broadcast Center as “easy and intuitive to use”. With time freed up, the team can now:
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Curate more impactful stories
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Highlight employee achievements more effectively
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Maintain a stronger global narrative
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Support organizational alignment
The impact
After implementing the Unily solution, CAE quickly saw major improvements in efficiency, engagement, and strategic communication value.
Broadcast Center reduced newsletter production time from 25–30 hours a week to just a few hours. This represents:
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An 80% time reduction
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Significant operational cost savings
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Reallocation of staff time to higher-value strategic communications
The more intuitive experience for employees – and the resulting 12% increase in clicks to the platform – has also had cultural benefits. More employees are now submitting their own stories and there is a greater connection between different locations and departments. For a business with such a dispersed workforce, this has become a big win.
Finally, Broadcast Center has established a foundation for future enhancements CAE is already planning. These include:
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Increased personalization
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Greater automation and content intelligence
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Full migration of all comms onto the Unily platform
By delivering higher engagement, lower costs, and enabling the comms function to be more strategic, Unily has become a core component of CAE’s push towards a modern digital employee experience. It’s unlocked a more impactful way to connect its global workforce – bringing employees closer to each other, to the business, and to the stories that define CAE’s mission.
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