Replication in distributed systems is a solution to improve availability and reliability. To replicate business objects cached by the middleware we aim at replica control at application level. To reach an efficient replication within a service-oriented environment we have to understand the structure of business objects to be able to reduce data transfer and processing time of messages.In this paper, we introduce a general cost model for business objects to predict the processing time of BOs in dependency of their structure. A BO model is proposed to create profiles of BOs. A system model is introduced to predict the processing time. We experimentally prove that we are able to specify system parameters and BO model parameters for our cost model. The proposed solution enables the determination of the processing time of BOs at a sender during the update process of BOs. Finally, we introduce a how to modify the update process for an efficient replication with our cost model.