Common Business Objects Layer (CBOs)

The next layer of the frameworks is the Common Business Objects layer (CBO). It is composed of several independent frameworks that fall into one of two categories: business objects common to multiple domains and common application level services. Speaking in general terms, the business objects represent those entities which a person knowledgeable in the domain would reference when describing how to perform a business task in non-technical terms. The common application services are more likely to be identified when discussing an approach for automating a process.

Business Partner is an example of a business object that we found in multiple domains. It encapsulates the characteristics of a customer or supplier, such as default currency, description, and the languages used by the partner. Another example of this type of CBO is Address. Address provides a generic way to describe a location, including a postal location. It provides support for different formatting controls for the address data, and relationships of an address to other objects such as locale and language. An example of the services type of CBO is the Decimal Structure. It provides the capability to define the number of decimal positions and rules about how the number is to be processed, such as rounding on input or output of the number.

For many of these common business objects, part of the basic structure and behavior is required by multiple application domains and part is unique to an individual domain. An example of this would be Business Partner where much of the structure related to currencies, languages, and addresses would be required by multiple domains while the structure and behavior associated with the product supplier relationship would be unique to the logistics domain. In such an instance the common portions are implemented within CBO and the unique structure and behavior is implemented as part of the application domain framework referencing the CBO structures.