"It does more than save us time. It enables us to get more granular with the data and better understand the drivers of better profitability for our business. That’s the power of Sapien." – Alex Cohn, Senior Director of Corporate Finance and Accounting at Carlex
About
Carlex is an industry-award winning global Tier 1 OEM and replacement glass manufacturer and supplier, with over 1,000 employees and operations spanning the U.S. and Europe. They serve leading automakers like Ford, Stellantis, and Subaru.
Challenge
Data complexity outpaced manual finance operations
Carlex’s finance team was up against a monumental task: manually managing vast, complex datasets from their five plants, each with multiple product lines. Every month, the lean finance team spent days working through Excel- and Power BI-based processes, with repetitive attribution and variance analysis prone to human assumptions and errors.
Carlex’s legacy tools and manual workflows lacked both the auditability and scalability required—and prevented the level of analytical depth needed to move from static monthly reports to actionable insights and profit levers across the business. This inefficiency risked delaying finance reports to higher-ups, potentially impacting strategic, board-level decisions. Over time, data visibility issues became more prevalent. Carlex’s finance team was bogged down by false positives, extended time-to-analysis, and reporting delays—with some issues representing millions of dollars hanging in the balance.
The sheer volume and complexity of Carlex’s data—spread across disconnected systems throughout its finance and operations stack—often left its lean finance team overwhelmed, lacking an efficient and scalable way to drill into SKU-, customer-, and plant-level insights that can move the needle.
Alex Cohn, Senior Director of Corporate Finance and Accounting, and Ryan Loper, Manager of Strategic Initiatives, teamed up to lead efforts to enhance accuracy and insight in the face of mounting operational pressure. They needed a solution that could add velocity and depth to their FinOps workflows, improve data traceability, and allow greater drill-down/ad-hoc capabilities without growing the finance team. Initially, they looked at a data analytics solution with future AI functionality, but it wasn’t the right fit. Carlex’s finance team needed speed and insights that could drive tangible business impact now—not just the potential for improvement down the line.
That’s when Sapien came into the picture—a Sapien rep reached out to Alex Rotolo, CFO at Carlex. Ryan Loper recalls, “They were building an FP&A product using AI, but there were other tasks we thought we could accomplish with it that could have a huge impact on our financials in terms of roles and responsibilities.”
By leveraging Sapien’s AI-native financial intelligence platform, Carlex transformed its finance function—turning manual reporting into automated, insight-rich analysis that improved accuracy, accelerated workflows, and revealed new profit opportunities across the organization.
“We needed to better understand what drives profitability for our business, take that data, and use it effectively.” – Alex Cohn, Senior Director of Corporate Finance and Accounting at Carlex
Solution
Transforming manual finance workflows with AI-powered, actionable insights
Sapien partnered closely with Carlex, building trust by aligning with their unique business needs, augmenting their legacy systems, and streamlining their financial operations for greater efficiency and depth. The platform integrated with their existing data sources and workflows in three phases: Replication, Enhancement, and Exploration.
Phase 1: Replication
Sapien rapidly automated Carlex’s manual, Excel-driven reporting, producing the same trusted outputs while dramatically increasing speed, accuracy, and the team’s capacity to focus on higher-value strategic work. Sapien also introduced click-through lineage to Carlex’s data, ensuring full traceability to the data source and calculation verification.
This leap to AI freed the finance team by cutting down effort and time spent on replicating attribution and variance analyses—a process that used to take days now takes minutes. This time savings means leadership receives timely reports to inform board-level conversations and decisions.
Phase 2: Enhancement
Sapien’s AI agent integrated seamlessly with Carlex’s ERP and raw datasets, requiring no integration work from the Carlex team. This transformed their analysis process at a granular level. By implementing high-level bins with drillable views, Alex’s finance team now sees SKU-, customer-, product-, and plant-level insights with period cohorts. The platform’s granularity enables them to perform side-by-side comparisons across any period. Sapien-enabled deep analysis helps the finance team identify profit and cost drivers more decisively, equipping them with the strategic insights to make smart resource allocation and performance improvement decisions.
In one of their early wins, Sapien flagged an inconsistency in a recurring mix calculation and traced it back to a spreadsheet formula issue. The result? A $10 million positive mix shifted to a true -$2 million mix loss—a $12 million delta.
The enhancement phase also introduced human-in-the-loop checkpoints to preserve existing FinOps governance in conjunction with the upgraded granularity. With trust mechanisms like click-through lineage and data location citations, Carlex’s finance team verifies calculations and source paths for quick validation and the ability to change and iterate on their existing workflows.
Phase 3: Exploration
With replication and enhancement phases complete, Sapien now acts as a proactive partner to Carlex, enabling anomaly detection and insight surfacing as new data flows in—even before the books are closed. Carlex’s finance team gained the ability to drill into causes of variance and target operational shifts more precisely.
Strategic leadership now identifies risks and opportunities as they emerge with Sapien’s proactive insights. This enables leaders to make informed strategic decisions that directly support long-term strategy and growth.
"With Sapien, we can see where data is coming from and what calculations they’re doing, which gives us more trust to know it’s not just making stuff up." – Ryan Loper, Manager of Strategic Initiatives
Results
Carlex analyzed 800% more data with Sapien
With Sapien, Carlex replaced slow, manual processes with efficient, automated analytics—reducing pressure on the finance team and improving accuracy. Transparent, drillable reports make it easy to audit data and catch issues in just a few clicks, saving time and instilling confidence in every result.
This transformation gives Carlex’s leadership the timely, reliable insights they need to inform strategic decisions and drive growth.
- 800% increase in reporting granularity
Looking ahead, the Carlex finance team is excited about the future of their partnership with Sapien. With sharper analytics and a more strategically empowered finance team, Carlex is well-positioned to leverage financial data for long-term business growth and profitability.
“They truly listen to what’s important to us to build a product that is perfect for Carlex—you’re not going to get that anywhere else.” – Alex Cohn, Senior Director of Corporate Finance and Accounting
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