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.
Tip
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. There are also a few helper objects that have no relationships to other objects, including the currency conversion objects. 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.
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 that would suit your requirements if you added some extra attributes or relationships to extend it. Extending Celonis object types explains how to do this. (You can’t customize Celonis event types, or add new event to object relationships involving them.) You can’t change the logic for the existing attributes and relationships in Celonis object types, but you can extend the object 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 with a new attribute that operates how you want it to.
Using the Celonis object types and event types means you can use the supplied perspectives and the Celonis apps and features that use them, rather than making your own custom perspectives. It also means you don’t need to reproduce attributes, relationships, and transformations that we already created. When you can’t find a Celonis object 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. Creating custom object types and custom event types has the instructions to do this.
When you extend Celonis object 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.