Competitors

Competitor Company / شركة منافسة — Customer Relationship Management > Marketing > Competitor Company. Competitor Company Item / صنف شركة منافسة — Customer Relationship Management > Marketing > Competitor Company Item.

Required licence

crm.

When Hala loses a chiller deal at Marina Plaza, the useful question afterwards is not why so much as to whom, and with what. These two files let the sales team record that on the product line itself: which rival company was in the room, and which of their products was quoted against yours.

Set the expectation first, though, because it saves disappointment later.

This is data capture, not competitive analysis

Nothing in the product reads the competitor you recorded. There is no report, no dashboard, no list view and no win/loss analysis anywhere in CRM that looks at competitor data, and a competitor line has no connection to the lead's status or its rejection reason. What you type here comes back out only through the list views, an Excel export, or a view your site builds in BI.

The two files, and the direction they point

Competitor Company is the rival firm. Its screen is genuinely just a name:

Field	Notes
Code, Group, Name1, Name2	The usual basic block.
Attachment 1 … Attachment 5	Where a brochure or a price list you got hold of can live.

Then the Dimensions / محددات group, and that is the entire record. There is no address, no contact, no market share, no notes box.

Competitor Company Item is one of their products — and its grid lists the products of yours that it competes with. That direction is the thing to get straight: you are not describing your item and listing rivals for it; you are describing a rival item and listing the items of yours it turns up against.

Field	Notes
Code, Group, Name1, Name2	The usual basic block.
Competitor Company / الشركة المنافسة	Which rival makes it.
Grid: Items corresponding to competitor Item / الأصناف المقابلة للصنف المنافس	Your items that compete with it.

The grid ships with two columns — Item and Remark. The row is capable of carrying eight more values (two references, two texts, two dates and two numbers), but they are not on the screen as shipped, so a site that wants to record, say, the competitor's list price has to have that column added to the layout first.

In the worked example, COMP-03 Ufuq Air Conditioning Co. (شركة الأفق للتكييف) is the rival, CITM-011 Ufuq Chiller 300 TR (تشيلر أفق 300 طن) is their machine, and the grid on CITM-011 lists AC-CHL-300, Al Nokhba's own 300-TR chiller.

Where the competitor files actually do something

Three small conveniences, all of them on the Products grid of a Lead, a Potential or a Call. That grid has a Competitor Company column and a Competitor Item / صنف الشركة المنافسة column next to each product you are quoting.

1. Pick the competitor item and the company fills itself. Choose CITM-011 on a product line and Competitor Company becomes COMP-03 without being asked.
2. The competitor-item picker narrows itself. Once the line has a competitor company and a product, the picker offers only that company's items, and only those whose grid lists the product on the line. On lead LD-00417, line AC-CHL-300 offers CITM-011; line AC-AHU-12 offers nothing, because no Ufuq item lists the AHU.
3. On a Call, the arrow reverses. Choose the competitor item first and the Product picker narrows to the items listed inside that competitor item's grid — useful when the customer opens the conversation by naming the rival's model.

That is the complete functional footprint. Nothing else in the module consults these two files.

If an old competitor item stops appearing in the picker

The narrowing in point 2 relies on an index that each competitor item rebuilds when it is saved. A record that was created before the item grid was filled in, or imported without going through the screen, can be missing from it — the symptom is a competitor item that exists but never appears once a product has been chosen on the line. Open the competitor item and save it again.

Setting them up

Create the Competitor Company first, then a Competitor Company Item for each of their products you regularly meet, and list your own competing items inside each one. Do not try to build a catalogue of everything a rival sells — build only the pairings your salespeople actually collide with, because the pairing is what makes the picker useful.

Neither screen validates anything on save, neither auto-fills a responsible employee, and neither has a Remarks box.

Reporting

Reporting: none. This module ships no system reports, and this screen has no print form. Getting the competitive picture back out means exporting the leads, potentials or calls with their product lines to Excel, or building the analysis in BI.