Order Management Object-centric Event Log in OCEL 2.0 Standard

General Description

This process describes the management of customer orders within a company, comprising both the registration and payment of incoming orders, as well as the process of packing and shipping these orders. For these tasks, our company deploys staff in their sales, warehousing, and shipment departments.

This is an artificial event log according to the OCEL 2.0 Standard simulated using CPN-Tools. Both the CPN and the SQLite can be downloaded. The simulation is an extension of the order management log in the former OCEL standard.

Process Overview

At our company, customers place orders (place order) for different products in varying amounts. Each product type has a price and a weight. In the current market situation, there is an inflation that irregularly leads to an increase of prices. These price rises have a negative impact on customers’ purchasing power, i.e., on order volumes.

When a customer places an order, this order is assigned to an employee of our company’s sales department. To foster customer satisfaction, our company has a single-face-to-customer policy. This means that per customer there is one primary sales representative who ought to render all services related to that customer. If that first representative is unavailable, a second sales representative should take care of the order. Should this employee be also unavailable, the order has to be managed by another employee. The tasks of sales employees comprise the registration (confirm order) as well as payment processing (payment reminder, pay order).

In parallel to this, the shipment of goods is prepared. For this, the stock of our company is checked by an employee of the warehousing department for the availability of the ordered items. If necessary, the warehouser reorders the item (item out of stock, reorder item). Items ready for shipment are collected (pick item) for the placement into packages that are addressed to single customers. Here, it may happen that a package content relates to multiple orders, and order volumes are distributed over multiple packages.

After all items allocated to a package have been picked, the package is compiled by a warehousing employee (create package). Later on, this package is picked up by a shipment employee for transport (send package). According to another policy, a warehousing employee should provide assistance to the shipment employee in loading the package. However, oftentimes shippers act contrary to that policy and load packages alone or together with a second shipment employee.

Finally, the package is shipped. Deliveries may fail repeatedly (failed delivery) until successful delivery (package delivered).

The figure below depicts the process in a simplified manner, using an informal process notation to describe the control-flow and the involved object types. A formal description is given along with the artifacts in the next section.

Further information can be found at: https://www.ocel-standard.org/event-logs/simulations/order-management/

General Properties 

An overview of log properties is given below.

Control-Flow Behavior 

The behavior of the log is described by a respective object-centric Petri net. Also, individual object types exhibit behavior that can be described by simpler Petri nets. See below.

Object Relationships 

The company pursues the "one-face-to-the-customer" policy, in which every customer has a dedicated sales representative as well as a deputy (secondary representative). These relationships are described in the log.

Additionally, object-to-object relations can emerge at executions of specific activities:

Simulation Model 

The CPN used to create this event log can also be downloaded.To obtain simulated data, extract the linked ZIP file and play out the CPN therein, e.g., by using CPN Tools.

The play-out produces CSV files according to the schema of OCEL2.0. The provided jupyter notebook can be used to convert these files to an SQLite dump.

For a technical documentation of the simulation model, please open the attached CPN with CPN Tools and see the annotations therein.

Acknowledgements

Funded under the Excellence Strategy of the Federal Government and the Länder. We also thank the Alexander von Humboldt (AvH) Stiftung for supporting our research.