To find candidate business entities, consider what information is created, read, or updated within the associated business processes. Only significant, persistent information should be considered as a business entity. The diagram below illustrates this approach by showing the entities involved in a business process:

Define all business processes and identify where and how business entities participate. The description of the business entity should include the entity's role in the business, and also its lifecycle from creation to deletion as illustrated in the defined processes. Other models may also be of use in understanding the business entity (see: Guideline: Business Perspective Views).

To show how business entities relate to each other associations are defined (see: ASSOCIATIONS). Give the associations names that help describe the relationship.

At the business level it is not desirable to show whole-part relationships, to define aggregation-relationships (or other complex relationships such as generalizations). This level of analysis, for IT architecture definitions, is left to the Logical level.  

Review the workflow of each business process to ensure that business entities have been found, and to verify that the ones identified do indeed participate in the workflow.

For more information on Business Entities, see: Guideline: Business Entity.

Review all relationships (only simple associations at the Business level) between business entities. Are the purposes and semantics of these relationships clear? Determine if these relationships are really necessary to the performance of the business entity's responsibilities. Also, confirm that the business entity does indeed have all the necessary relationships required to support the business.

Relationships may be derived from examining Process Models ... look for linkages required between entities to support the process. Business management requirements (i.e. Business Metrics) are also an important source for requirements for relationships between entities. Also see: Guideline: Business Entity.

Decide what operations the business entity should have. Base your decisions on the operations of the business entity within each business process in which it participates. These operations implement the required manipulations for Business Actors (and Roles) to create, access and modify the business entity. Briefly describe each operation. Explain how all operations are related, including the business entity's lifecycle if desired.

See the discussion on operations in: Guideline: Business Entity.

Identify and briefly describe the attributes of the business entity. Attributes are either properties of the business entity or any information that it requires to perform its responsibilities that is not another business entity. An item of information that needs to be determined or calculated (on-demand) must be presented in the form of an operation, rather than as an attribute of the business entity. Attributes represent persistent properties of the business entity.

See also the discussion of attributes in: Guideline: Business Entity.

Inspect the Business Entity's operations. Candidate business events include significant changes of state (for example, an Order that changes from received to process, or a proposal that changes from proposed to accepted). Operations that trigger these changes of state might also cause these business events. Also examine what business actors or other business entities should be notified of the business event. Inspect the business entity's relationships with other business entities. Are there any important changes in these related entities of which the business entity should be notified?

This is an optional, but very useful aspect for the Business Entity Model. The most important thing is to capture a clear picture of the business entities, their relationships to other entities, and optionally important attributes and operations.

Review and discuss the Business Entity Model with other members of the team and appropriate stakeholders to ensure that they have a clear understanding of the business entities and agree on their descriptions and other aspects.

See also:  and Checklist: Business Entities.