What Is A Business Object?

A business object (BO) is a powerful tool used throughout the system. For many maintenance objects, a BO is a key attribute of the record used to define the data it captures, its user interface behavior and its business rules. Some business objects support the definition of a lifecycle, capturing different states that a record may go through, allowing for different business rules to be executed along the way. This type of business object is considered the “identifying” or “governing” business object. We will see later that other types of BOs exist that are different from the “identifying” business object.

The use of business objects allows for extensibility and customization of product delivered maintenance objects. There are many options to adjust the behavior of base delivered business objects. In addition, implementations may introduce their own business objects if the base product delivered objects do not meet their business needs.

Note: Not all maintenance objects in the product support business objects as a “identifying” or “governing” tool. This is the standard going forward for new maintenance objects. However, there are some maintenance objects created before this became a standard.