Global retailer improves data accuracy and scales automated processes

Company overview

Centric Brands, LLC is a leading global lifestyle brand collective with unparalleled expertise in product design, development and sourcing, retail and digital commerce, marketing and brand-building. Centric designs, sources, markets and sells high-quality products in the men’s, women’s and children’s apparel, accessories, beauty and entertainment categories.

The company’s portfolio includes licenses for more than 100 iconic brands, including Calvin Klein, Under Armour and Disney. Centric owns and operates Avirex®, Fiorelli®, Hudson®, Robert Graham® and Taste Beauty® and operates joint venture brands, Favorite Daughter, Jennifer Fisher and Preston Lane.

With such a broad portfolio and extensive supply chain, the business requires efficient data management and automation to keep its operations running smoothly.

Business challenges

When Centric became its own entity in 2018, its IT team migrated its automation infrastructure to SAP BPA by Redwood (hereafter referred to as “BPA”), which was the platform its parent company had been successfully using for years. The move ensured continuity in automation across organization-wide workflows.

In 2024, however, with BPA reaching end-of-support, Centric needed to transition to a new workload automation (WLA) solution — one that would offer the same level of reliability while setting the foundation for growth.

The move wouldn’t just be a technical upgrade. It needed to offer the potential to transform business-critical processes, including financial planning, supply chain replenishment, data management and reporting. Any disruption could impact financial decision-making, inventory planning and business performance.

Sharmendra Silva, former VP of Information Technology, explains, “Every day, the business relies on critical reports that come in starting at 4 AM. Even if there’s a delay of half an hour, that will impact the ability of people downstream to get their hands on the data. This orchestration is very complex.”

Adding to the complexity was Centric’s intricate 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-premises) 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.

Solution

After a meticulous evaluation and their positive experience with BPA, Centric determined Redwood Software was the best choice to modernize their job scheduling with its future-ready successor: RunMyJobs by Redwood. The project would involve transitioning two BPA environments (one production and one non-production) and key automation workloads, including EDI processes, high-volume batch invoicing, report downloads and data replication.

Sharmendra’s team took a structured approach, focusing on testing and identifying critical jobs early on.

Despite a tight timeline due to a routine year-end system freeze, the transition was remarkably smooth. Sharmendra and team achieved a holiday-season cutover by early November and came in under budget.

“I can’t reiterate enough the significance of this implementation and how smooth it was,” he says. “Senior leadership had visibility into the project, and it was one of the best go-lives I’ve seen at Centric.”

Results

RunMyJobs has significantly impacted Centric’s IT operations. With its strong monitoring tools, the IT team has greater visibility into job execution and dependencies, which allows them to proactively address issues before they impact operations and meet service-level agreements (SLAs) better than ever.

Optimizing workflows and eliminating unnecessary jobs like operating system-level file creation and modification has boosted efficiency.

“RunMyJobs is the heart of the organization in terms of our IT landscape,” Sharmendra says. “Any impact on a job in RunMyJobs will impact every other system, which will impact the larger business.”

The future with Redwood

With a successful migration behind them, the Centric team is exploring how to further leverage RunMyJobs within their IT ecosystem, namely to orchestrate data pipelines across SAP and non-SAP systems like Snowflake to not only gain better and more timely insights but also incorporate new AI capabilities in daily business tasks.

As they’re actively examining what their SAP ECC to S/4HANA and SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) roadmap will look like, they’re especially focused on ensuring critical automated processes remain scalable and adaptable. This may also mean evaluating non-SAP use cases for RunMyJobs.

Its robust WLA foundation positions Centric to scale, optimize and innovate, all while ensuring business continuity and IT efficiency.