Business Object Relationship Modelling

The business object relationship model (BORM) provides a flexible architecture for establishing and maintaining the relationships that form the foundation of the business model. You can support business-to-business and business-to-consumer models within a single implementation of the BORM.

A business object is any entity for which you store data and that participates in one or more business relationships. The primary key on the business object record, the BO_ID, acts as a pointer to the entity records. This design enables you to create and maintain relationships between different entities without regard to their various key structures.

Business objects participate in relationships with other business objects according to their assigned roles. Business object types categorize business objects and enable you to define roles for each type. The business object record also provides a common field (BO_NAME) for naming different entities that participate in relationships. For a relationship to be meaningful to users, you should associate a name with each relationship participant.

You can add organization-specific entities to the system and manage relationships for these new entities in the core PeopleSoft Customer Relationship Management (PeopleSoft CRM) applications with little or no application customization.

PeopleSoft Customer Relationship Management (CRM) delivers a set of transactions, or components, for creating business objects:

• Company

• Site

• Person

• Worker

Every business object that you create in a system component has a type of either Organization or Individual. The Organization business objects are either companies or sites; and the Individual business objects are persons. The Person business object can represent any or all of the following: a consumer, a contact, or a worker, depending on the role that is associated with it.

You must associate a business object with a role before it can participate in a relationship. In the business object relationship model, the roles that a business object can play are tracked in the Business Object Role table (BO_ROLE). Delivered roles are associated with company, consumer, site, contact, and worker business objects. You can define additional roles.

In most cases, the way that you create the business object determines its role. For example, when you create a business object in the Company component, the Company role is automatically assigned to it.

Business object relationship records (BO_REL) capture a connection between two business objects, each playing a specific role. You create relationships to track and view information about customers. For example, relationships can show the corporate structure of a company and the contacts that you work with at each of the corporate sites.

To establish a relationship between two business objects, you first define relationship type records (BO_REL_TYPE), which define the rules of the relationship, including the role that a business object must have to participate in the relationship, and the number of business objects that can participate in a specific relationship role.

Company, site, person, and worker business objects participate in the delivered relationship types. You can define additional relationship types to support business needs.

In the BORM, customers are the company, site, and consumer business objects. When you define any customer to the system, a record is created in the Business Contact (BC) table. This record enables you to define sold to, ship to, or bill to options for customer business objects. You can manage contact information based on the purchasing options—sell to, ship to, or bill to options—that are assigned to the business object.

See Understanding Purchasing Options.