Microsoft Dynamics 4.0 presents Accounts and Competitors as different entities. In most cases this setup might be sufficient, but sometimes an account can be a (potential) customer in one segment of your business, and a competitor in another.

While working with my customer last week, this question popped up, and here is the solution to it.

The solution

The solution is to create a relationship between two entities and a workflow to synchronize competitor records. Your users will not need to create new competitor records, but only properly choose Relationship attribute of an account record.

Creating relationship

In order to connect these two entities we need to create a new relationship. Basically this is 1:1 relationship, but, since these are not allowed, we are going to use Account (N:1) Competitor relationship instead.

Create a new relationship and configure it as shown in the figure below.

You will also need to add a field on Account entity form so that you can configure a workflow to update this value.

Creating workflow

This workflow is going to create a new competitor record for each entity that is marked as competitor. If related competitor record already exists, it will be updated. The workflow is shown in the following figure:

It looks simple, but you will need to configure field mapping and other settings in order to make it work properly. If you need help with re-creating this workflow, feel free to drop me a line.

Security

Before rolling-out this solution check that your salespeople have the proper permissions to create competitor records in your CRM.