Perspectives
Each of your business processes involves only some of the object types and event types in the object-centric representation of your business. The object types, event types, and relationships that are important for understanding the Accounts Payable business process, are different from those that are important for understanding the Inventory Management business process, for example. Celonis EMS can isolate a subset of the object types and event types in the object-centric data model that is relevant to a process, or to another grouping that you want to analyze. This view on the object-centric data model is called a perspective.
Perspectives can contain Celonis object types, event types, and relationships, or custom types and relationships that you have created, or a combination of both. They let you apply different viewpoints to the same modeled objects and events, so that you don’t need to ingest and transform the source data again to model each process.
We've prebuilt perspectives for the Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Order Management, Procurement, and Inventory Management business processes using the Celonis types and relationships. You can also create custom perspectives using the perspective builder.
Perspectives are important not just to save time on analysis, but also because the query context is important to Celonis EMS. In the object-centric data model there are often multiple relationships between a pair of object types. To construct a PQL query, Celonis EMS needs to know which relationship is relevant for the analysis. A perspective includes only the relationships that need to be used in the analysis, so that the query context is unambiguous.
Event logs
Celonis apps and tools that are built for object-centric process mining, such as the End-To-End Lead Times App, can use perspectives directly. However, apps and tools that don't currently support object-centric process mining need case-centric event logs for backward compatibility.
Although object-centric process mining doesn’t need event logs, all of the information that you need to construct an event log for a particular case is still held in the objects and events that you've created using your business data. When you need to use case-centric applications or views, Celonis EMS can build event logs from the information in these objects and events. Event logs pull data from your objects and events into a format focused on the events that happen to a single object through its lifecycle. This format is compatible with existing process mining tools.
Event logs are built from perspectives. Each Celonis-supplied or custom perspective can have a default event log and alternative event logs.
The default event logs create activity tables in the Celonis EMS Studio for backward compatibility. You can create views to analyze them, or write custom PQL to work with them.
When you create a custom perspective in the perspective builder, you can set up one or more event logs that Celonis EMS builds from it. You can choose what object type is the case for the event log, and what event types are included in it.
You can dynamically create an event log in PQL using the
PROJECT_ON_OBJECToperator.
(We called these event logs “projections” in the first release of the object-centric process mining user interface and information, so if you’re looking for that term, you can just use “event logs” now.)
Data extractions and transformations for object-centric process mining explains how data is ingested to the object types, event types, and relationships to create objects and events.