Modeling objects and events
The object-centric data model includes prebuilt Celonis object types, event types, object to object relationships, and event to object relationships for the Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Order Management, Procurement, and Inventory Management business processes. Object-centric process mining overview explains how these work, and here's the summary:
An object type is a standardized definition of an object (such as an invoice), and what attributes it has (such as the invoice total).
An event type is a standardized definition of what happens to objects and their attributes when an event takes place (such as shipping an order).
Object to object relationships and event to object relationships are defined as part of object types and event types. They show the expected relationships of objects and events to each other in business processes.
When you start modeling your own business processes, look through the prebuilt Celonis object types and event types to see if you can reuse any of them in your own processes. To find them, from the Celonis navigation bar, select Data > Objects and Events. You can explore the Celonis object types as a list or in the Graph view of the object-centric data model. The default is the lists of objects and events. The object-centric data model explains how to filter the lists, and how to use the graph.
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Some of the objects in the object-centric data model are master data objects that usually provide additional information about other objects, and don’t have any events themselves. The master data objects are Customer, CustomerMasterCompanyCode, CustomerMasterCreditManagement, Material, MaterialMasterPlant, Plant, User, Vendor, and VendorMasterCompanyCode. You might want to reuse some of these objects to model your own processes. If you can't see them in the Graph view, they're probably filtered out - unset the filter to see them.
The object-centric data model can include standalone helper objects that provide reference information to PQL functions, such as tables for dates, currency conversion, and quantity conversion. The Celonis catalog processes include the CurrencyConversion and QuantityConversion helper objects which you can reuse. You can also create and include your own reference tables, and other types of helper object such as lists of values. Using helper objects in an object-centric data model has more on these.
When you’re looking at an object type’s relationships in the list view, by default you’ll only see the Celonis-supplied relationships for the processes you’ve enabled in your object-centric data model. Check Include inactive to show all the prebuilt relationships that exist for the object, including those in processes that you haven’t enabled yet.
You might find a Celonis object type or event type that would suit your requirements if you added some extra attributes or relationships to extend it. Extending Celonis object types and event types explains how to do this. You can’t change the logic for the existing attributes and relationships in Celonis object types and event types, but you can extend the object type or event type, then customize your views and apps to use your custom properties or relationships instead of the supplied ones. For example, if your business uses a tax-exclusive total for invoices but the Celonis-supplied attribute is inclusive of tax, you can extend the object type or event type with a new attribute that operates how you want it to.
If what you want to achieve by customizing the process is to analyze events with more granularity, event logs can now subset event types using their attributes. For example, if you want to look at each type of status update for a support ticket separately, you don't need to create a different event for each possible status. Instead, when you set up event logs, you can select attributes or combinations of attributes that events will be grouped by. This method works especially well if you want to:
Group events using an attribute whose values are dynamically defined or might be added to in the future (for example, if you introduce a new delivery method). You won't need to set up new events for new attribute values.
Group events using several attributes that have a hierarchical relationship (for example, country, then city) or a logical relationship (for example, suspend status and suspend code). You won't need to set up different events for each combination of attribute values.
Using the Celonis object types and event types means you don’t need to reproduce attributes, relationships, and transformations that we already created. It also means you don’t have to make changes to the supplied perspectives and the Celonis apps and features that use them. When you can’t find a Celonis object type or event type that would suit your requirements after extensions, or when you need to model something that isn’t covered at all in the prebuilt object-centric data model, you can create new object types and event types using our editors. If your source data already has tables representing objects, you can import them to generate object types with their attributes. Creating custom object types and custom event types has the instructions to do this.
When you extend Celonis object types and event types, Celonis automatically extends the underlying database tables to include your added attributes and relationships. And when you create custom object types and custom event types, Celonis automatically creates database tables for them. You need to build and run custom SQL transformations to map the relevant data extracted from your business system into the created tables. Creating custom transformations explains how to do this.
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The Celonis Academy course Object-Centric Modeling Best Practices has training, tips, and strategies for creating a custom object-centric data model. Check out the course for advice from our modeling experts.