Celonis Product Documentation

Object-centric process mining is a technology that enables the analysis of interrelated objects and events involved in business processes. An object is a representation of something connected to your business, and an event is a representation of something that happened to one or more of those objects. With object-centric process mining, events are related to objects instead of to a single case, making it possible to fully view complex and interacting processes from any angle.

A lot of objects and events are found across most businesses. We’ve prebuilt a set of object types, event types, and relationships that are common to most businesses. These Celonis types and relationships make up the object-centric data model.

Each of your business processes involves only some of the object types, event types, and relationships in the object-centric data model. You can enable and use one or more Celonis processes containing a subset of our prebuilt object types, event types, and relationships. Choose from the Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Order Management, Procurement, and Inventory Management business processes, or enable any combination of them. Each process includes a perspective that identifies the object types, event types, and relationships for the process. Our applications use the perspective to access the objects and events created from your business data.

The object-centric data model that we supply can be extended for your specific business needs and use cases. You can extend the Celonis object types by adding custom attributes and relationships to them. And you can use our self-service tools to build your own custom object types and event types, and perspectives that include them. In this way you can model a complete digital twin of your business, or any business process that you want, and make it available for object-centric process mining.

Case-centric process mining and object-centric process mining

With traditional case-centric process mining, the objects and events involved in a single instance of a process (a case) are recorded all together in an event log that tracks the case from beginning to end. This fixed format lets you access and analyze processes, but it isn't very flexible and can sometimes lead to inaccuracies.

With object-centric process mining, we build a picture that's more like reality. Objects exist outside of the processes that they are involved in, and they can be involved in different processes, and in the same process more than once. Each event is identified as a single incident, which can involve one or many objects of different types. Object-centric process mining models the real world - not the world as a business system stores it.

Compared to an analysis from the perspective of a single business object, modeling with objects and events gives you a more flexible way to analyze complex and interconnected business operations. Once the extracted data from source systems has been transformed into objects and events, they can be used to analyze multiple processes using different perspectives without needing to extract and transform the data again.

All of the information that you would need to construct an event log for a particular case is still held in the objects, events, and changes that are in the modeled digital twin of your business. When you need to use applications or views that were designed to analyze event logs, Celonis can use a perspective to build event logs from the information in these objects, events, and changes. Celonis apps and views that require case-centric representations can use these event logs just like they would with a case-centric data model.