A business entity is an entity of importance to your organization and consists of fields that support your data needs. To define a business entity, decide on the fields based on the data that your source systems will contribute to the master data.
For example, a company that manufactures cars might define business entities for some or all of the following entities: customers, employees, suppliers, factories, materials, and products. A charitable organization might define donors, households, and projects. A health care provider might define doctors, care sites, and insured services.
When you use the predefined data model, edit the business entity properties and fields to match the needs of your organization. For example, you can change the name of the business entity, change field names or remove fields that are not relevant to your organization. You can also create custom configurations around data quality, search, and survivorship.
To define a business entity, you often use an iterative process. You can come back later to add more fields and to modify or add configurations, such as data quality, search, and survivorship.
After you modify or add configurations, instruct users of business applications to refresh their browsers to apply the change. For example, when you add a field to a business entity, the field appears in the records of the business entity after users refresh their browsers. If users don't refresh their browsers, the fields don't appear.
Before you define a business entity, determine the type of business entity that you want to use.
You can define and use the following types of business entities: