Objects, events, and relationships
Object-centric process mining (OCPM) starts with visualizing your business as objects, events, and the relationships between them. By modelling these, you create a digital twin of your business.
Objects: An object is a digital representation of a real-world business entity, such as a customer, company, order, or invoice. Each object instance (for example, a specific invoice) has attributes like ID, total price, and currency, which store its current known facts. When an attribute changes, the system records the change with a timestamp and the old and new values.
Events: An event represents a real-world occurrence that happens at a specific point in time to one or more object. For example, an invoice was paid, a purchase order was created, or an order was shipped.
Events have attributes such as an ID, timestamp, and details about who or what caused them. These attributes can be used to group or analyze events.
Relationships between objects and events: Relationships describe how objects and events are connected.
Events → Objects relationships: These relationships shows which events involve or affect a specific object, like a purchase order being created, approved, or shipped. This connection lets you track the lifecycle of each object through the events that touch it, giving a detailed view of its journey in the process.
Objects → Objects relationships: These relationships define how objects connect to each other, whether ne-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, or many-to-many, helping you understand dependencies and interactions across your processes.
To understand how objects, events, and relatioships work, let's look at an Order-to-Cash (O2C) process.
Use case: Order-to-Cash (O2C) process in a manufacturing company
The order-to-cash process in manufacturing is the end-to-end workflow that begins when a customer places an order and ends when the manufacturer receives payment. It includes order entry, production and fulfillment, shipping, invoicing, and collections to ensure products are delivered and revenue is captured efficiently.
With the O2C process, the following example objects, events, and relationships can be seen:
O2C objects
In object-centric process mining, multiple objects exist in a single process. For O2C, typical objects could include:
Customer Order (primary object)
Product (item being sold)
Delivery (shipment associated with an order)
Invoice (billing document)
O2C events
Events are activities that involve one or more objects. Examples include:
Event | Example timestamp | Related objects |
|---|---|---|
Order created | 2025-11-01 08:00 | Customer Order |
Product picked | 2025-11-02 10:00 | Product, Customer Order |
Product packed | 2025-11-02 14:00 | Product, Customer Order |
Delivery shipped | 2025-11-03 09:00 | Delivery, Customer Order, Product |
Invoice issued | 2025-11-04 11:00 | Invoice, Customer Order |
O2C relationships
Relationships describe how objects are connected, often many-to-many:
Customer Order ↔ Product: One order can contain multiple products; a product may appear in multiple orders (for repeat items).
Customer Order ↔ Delivery: One order may result in one or multiple deliveries (partial shipment).
Customer Order ↔ Invoice: One order generates one or multiple invoices (split billing).
Graphically, you can imagine it as a network:
Order 123 ├─ Product A ├─ Product B ├─ Delivery D1 └─ Invoice I1
Why OCPM helps here
In traditional process mining, you’d have to “flatten” the process to a single case (e.g., order ID), which loses detail about products or deliveries.
With object-centric mining, you can analyze interactions across objects, for example:
Delays in product picking affecting multiple deliveries.
Partial shipments leading to invoice inconsistencies.
Bottlenecks caused by products shared across multiple orders.