How Centric Scaled Automation to Prepare for SAP S/4HANA and AI

Centric Brands, a global lifestyle brand collective, needed to upgrade their process automation systems to meet current and future global demands. According to a case study by Redwood Software, Centric was a longtime customer that had migrated to the SAP Build Process Automation (BPA), which Redwood used, in 2018. However, Centric needed to transition to a new workload automation platform in 2024 when BPA reached an end-of-support phase.

The upgrade needed to offer the potential to transform business-critical processes including financial planning, supply chain replenishment, data management, and reporting. Any downtime would have a negative impact on financial decision-making, inventory planning and business performance.

Another challenge was Centric’s SAP environment, which consisted of:

• SAP ECC (on-premises) supporting critical business functions
• SAP’s Industry Solutions for Apparel and Footwear (AFS) and supply chain management functions
• SAP Business Warehouse on HANA (on-premise) and SAP Business Warehouse 4HANA for reporting and analytics, with data replicated via SAP Smart Data Integration (SDI)
• SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) for financial planning
• Integrations with various non-SAP systems across many end-to-end processes.

Automation played a critical role in orchestrating processes across these systems, so selecting the right WLA platform was essential.

Finding the Right Process Automation Solution

Centric chose Redwood’s RunMyJobs software to modernize their job scheduling. The RunMyJobs platform is designed to enable demand planning, compliance reporting, and supply chain performance optimization.

The project involved transitioning two SAP BPA environments (one production and one non-production) and key automation workloads. This included Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) processes, high-volume batch invoicing, report downloads, and data replication.

Despite a tight timeline due to a routine system freeze, the team achieved a holiday-season cutover by early November and came in under budget.

Significant Results and Future-Ready Efficiencies

RunMyJobs has significantly impacted Centric’s IT operations. Its monitoring tools provided the IT team with greater visibility into job execution and dependencies, which allowed them to address issues before they negatively impacted operations or service-level agreements (SLAs). Optimizing workflows and eliminating unnecessary jobs like operating system-level file creation and modification has boosted efficiency.

With the migration successfully completed, the Centric team is exploring how to further leverage RunMyJobs within their IT ecosystem. Their goal is to orchestrate data pipelines across SAP and non-SAP systems to gain better and more timely insights while also incorporating AI capabilities in daily business tasks.

As they evaluate their roadmap from SAP ECC to S/4HANA and SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), they are focused on ensuring critical automated processes remain both scalable and adaptable.

What This Means for SAP Insiders

Workload automation modernization is now essential for ERP resilience. For example, Centric’s shift from SAP BPA to RunMyJobs through Redwood illustrates how end-of-support cycles are forcing companies to reassess their automation foundations. As a result, there’s growing demand for interoperable, cloud-ready WLA platforms that protect ERP uptime while also maintaining integration reliability.

Cross-system orchestration is now vital for hybrid SAP landscapes. Centric’s blend of SAP ECC, SAP AFC, SAP BW/4HANA, SAP BPC and non-SAP systems indicates how WLA tools need to coordinate high-volume workloads end-to-end. The migration demonstrates how improved visibility, dependency management, and workflow rationalization can enhance SLAs, reduce operational noise and prepare organizations for architectural change.

Automation platforms are becoming core to intelligent ERP transformation. Centric’s post-migration roadmap linking RunMyJobs to data orchestration, timeliness, and modernization indicates that workload automation is becoming a strategic accelerator. SAP customers should view WLA as a long-term investment shaping cloud readiness and intelligent ERP adoption.