If your organization schedules SAP jobs through SAP Central Process Scheduling by Redwood, the ground has shifted. The product line CPS belongs to has reached end of support, which means the software running your business-critical batch processing no longer receives updates or fixes. This guide explains what that means, why years of accumulated scheduling logic cannot simply be copied to a new tool, and how a conversion-based migration moves it onto supported software with its cross-system logic intact.
What SAP CPS is
SAP Central Process Scheduling by Redwood (SAP CPS) is the central scheduling tool SAP offered on top of the SAP NetWeaver platform. Where the built-in transactions SM36 and SM37 schedule and monitor jobs only on the local system, CPS was designed to run and monitor time- and event-driven jobs and job chains across an entire SAP landscape. It connects to SAP systems through the External Interface for Background Processing (XBP) and ships in two editions: a free-of-charge license for SAP-only scheduling and a chargeable license that adds non-SAP processes. Co-developed by SAP and Redwood Software, it was, for years, SAP’s recommended step up from local background processing.
CPS is a legacy product. Its last major version, CPS 8.0, shipped in 2010, and SAP’s own guidance points customers to its successor, SAP Business Process Automation by Redwood (SAP BPA).
Its support status today
The support milestone that matters is BPA’s, not CPS’s. As part of SAP’s strategic focus on S/4HANA Cloud, SAP ended mainstream maintenance on December 31, 2024 for many applications built on the NetWeaver Java stack, SAP BPA among them, which means no further upgrades or new features are released. Well before that date, SAP’s guidance had already been pointing customers toward its successor products.
For teams still running CPS or BPA, the practical position is straightforward: business-critical batch processing now depends on software that no longer receives updates. The vendor’s own path forward is a move to its SaaS scheduler, RunMyJobs by Redwood, on a subscription, execution-based pricing model. That is one option. It is not the only one, and the interface CPS was built on gives you a second.
What a CPS configuration contains
A CPS configuration is rarely just a list of jobs. Over years of operation, it accumulates job definitions with their program variants and parameters, calendars and scheduling rules, cross-system job chains, and the dependencies between them, much of it undocumented and held in the heads of the people who built it. That accumulated logic, not the raw job count, is what makes migration hard.
Why lift-and-shift falls short
Because the value is in the dependencies, a straight lift-and-shift rarely works. Recreating hundreds or thousands of job definitions and chains by hand is slow, error-prone, and loses exactly the cross-system logic that matters most. The goal of a migration is not to copy jobs one by one; it is to bring everything under new control with its structure intact.
Convert instead of rebuild
Control-M approaches a CPS migration as a conversion, not a rebuild. The Control-M Conversion Tool imports existing SAP job definitions, jobs and calendars together, and produces an assessment report that enumerates what is already there, so the scope is measured rather than guessed. The workflow runs in defined stages: select the project, evaluate the data, run the conversion, validate the results, and load the converted jobs into Control-M. Manual re-entry, and the transcription errors that come with it, drops out of the process.
Where converted jobs land
The landing zone is the same interface family CPS used. Control-M connects to SAP through the certified XBP interface, so converted jobs arrive in an environment built on the connection they already ran on. Once there, they gain capabilities native background scheduling could not offer at enterprise scale: interception of jobs scheduled directly by users, detection of the full parent-child job tree so successors start only when every child process has finished, and service level agreement (SLA) management that flags a missed deadline before it happens.
Simulate before you cut over
A scheduler migration is only as safe as the cutover. Before go-live, Control-M’s Forecast and What-If simulate the batch run against the converted schedule, so you can see how it behaves without touching production. A parallel-run period, old and new scheduling side by side, lets you confirm results match before the old system is retired. For the cutover weekend itself, maintenance-window control can globally stop, hold, and restart every scheduled job, so nothing writes into SAP mid-transition.
Frequently asked questions
Is SAP CPS still supported?
SAP CPS is a legacy product, superseded by SAP Business Process Automation by Redwood (SAP BPA). SAP ended mainstream maintenance for SAP BPA on December 31, 2024 as part of its move away from the NetWeaver Java stack, and no further upgrades are issued for it. Organizations still running CPS or BPA are, in practice, operating on software that is no longer maintained, and should plan a migration.
What are the options for replacing SAP CPS?
The vendor’s own path is RunMyJobs by Redwood, a subscription SaaS scheduler. Enterprises also have the option of moving to an established workload automation platform such as Control-M, which connects through the same certified XBP interface CPS used and converts existing job definitions rather than requiring a manual rebuild.
Do existing jobs have to be rebuilt by hand?
No. The Control-M Conversion Tool imports existing SAP jobs and calendars and produces an assessment report of what is already scheduled, so the migration converts what already exists instead of recreating it from scratch.
Next steps
If you’re planning a move off CPS, the next step is seeing how converted jobs run under end-to-end orchestration. Explore Control-M for SAP or access the Control-M demo library.
These postings are my own and do not necessarily represent BMC's position, strategies, or opinion.
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