Home
User Guide
With Unica Plan, you organize the people, tasks, and budget for marketing programs, while you reduce costs and time to market.
Approvals
An approval process streamlines the process of having your work reviewed and approved. Multiple users can review work in parallel or in an order that represents your business processes.
Approval concepts
An approval is an item or group of items that approvers review and respond to, either by approving, suggesting changes, or denying. The approval process makes sure the right people view and sign off on content, creatives, and marketing objects.
Approval dates
When you create an approval from a workflow task, the approval must include a Target Due Date.

User Guide
With Unica Plan, you organize the people, tasks, and budget for marketing programs, while you reduce costs and time to market.
- Introduction
  Unica Plan is a tool for enterprise planning, collaboration, and workflow that provides a complete solution for the needs of marketers. You can use Unica Plan to get a comprehensive and holistic view of all marketing projects across your company.
- Common tasks
- Plans
  Plans capture the objectives of a business unit or geographic area for a specific timeframe, such as a year or a quarter. A plan is the container for your marketing programs and projects.
- Programs
  Programs are the child-objects of Plans. Programs can contain multiple projects to organize work for your organization.
- Projects
  A project organizes all the information that is related to develop and run one or more related marketing initiatives. Projects contain general information, resources, and attachments for the marketing initiative. Projects also typically organize the people who work on the marketing initiative, including who completes which tasks, and the timeline to complete the tasks. Projects can also include budget information. Monitoring features ensure that everyone knows whether the project is completed on time.
- Workflows
  To help you complete different workflow-related efforts, the Workflow tab offers different view modes and an edit mode.
- Approvals
  An approval process streamlines the process of having your work reviewed and approved. Multiple users can review work in parallel or in an order that represents your business processes.
  - Approval concepts
    An approval is an item or group of items that approvers review and respond to, either by approving, suggesting changes, or denying. The approval process makes sure the right people view and sign off on content, creatives, and marketing objects.
    - Stand-alone approvals
      Stand-alone approvals exist apart from any projects or other business process. They are not connected to any workflows and their security permissions are configured differently.
    - Approval tasks
      A Flowchart approval task is an approval process that is connected to a step in a workflow.
    - Reapproval rules for form approvals
      You can link forms to approvals in the workflow to send completed forms for approval. After the user completes a form task, the next task in the workflow can include approving the form.
    - Configuring form approval tasks
      You can use approval tasks to send forms that were completed earlier in the workflow for review.
    - Approval dates
      When you create an approval from a workflow task, the approval must include a Target Due Date.
    - Due dates for approvals
      Unica Plan determines individual due dates for approvers to complete their reviews. Due dates for approvals depend on whether the approver is required or optional and the approver's place in the sequence.
    - Approval Sequence
      Approval processes can contain sequential and parallel portions for required approvers. Sequential approvers review one after the other; an approver with a later sequence number must wait for the previous approvers to finish. By contrast, approvers with the same sequence number review at the same time.
    - Rejected approvals
      If a required approver denies the approval, the approval process stops and the status changes to On Hold. The approval owner must resubmit the approval for the approval process to continue.
    - Approval organization
      When you select Operations > Approvals, My Active Approvals is the default page. The My Active Approvals page lists any active approvals to which you can respond.
  - Approval process workflow
    To begin the approval process, you create an approval, add approvers, and add approval items. Then, you submit the approval and the review process begins. Unica Plan sends the approval process to approvers based on their sequence and whether the reviewers are required or optional. The approval process can go through several iterations as all the approvers complete their review.
  - Reassigning team approvals
    When your team is assigned as an approver, you can accept the approval or reassign it to someone else on your team. Reassignment options depend on how your team is configured.
  - Approval processes linked to workflow tasks
    Approval processes can be linked to workflow tasks. If an approval process is linked to the workflow, editing the approval process changes the workflow task.
  - Attachment markup types in Unica Plan
    You can use markup tools to add feedback directly on top of an attachment. Unica Plan has two different methods for marking up attachments: native Unica Plan markup and Adobe markup. Your administrator chose one of these methods for markup during installation.
- People and teams
  In Unica Plan, you assign work to teams or individual users.
- Calendar
  Historically, organizations produced paper-based calendars and updated them with the latest information. The calendar feature provides marketing groups with electronic means to view and update calendar data.
- Grids
  A grid is a spreadsheet-like presentation of data. Grids allow Unica Plan users to store all campaign- and project-related data within the project.
- Marketing objects
  A marketing object is any work product a team develops and reuses in the course of its marketing activities. Marketing objects can represent physical items (such as a letter or banner ad) or a business component (such as a credit card offer, a target segment definition, or a rewards program definition).
- Assets and asset libraries
  Unica Plan provides centralized management, secure storage, and web-based access for digital assets.
- Budgets
  In Unica Plan, a budget coordinates expenses of plans, programs, and projects. After you establish the plan budget, you can fund linked programs, and ultimately projects, from it. Unica Plan tracks budgets of child programs and projects in the form of allocations, forecasted or committed spending, and actual expenses.
- Invoices
  In Unica Plan, you can view all changes that were made to an invoice, including the time and date of the changes and the type of changes made.
- Accounts
  A top-level Unica Plan account represents a corporate account that is established by a finance department for tracking and controlling expenditures and cash flows for specific areas of the business. Accounts can have subaccounts.
- Metrics
  Metrics are used for management reports and analysis. View metrics on the Tracking tab for plans, programs, and projects.
- Reports
  By default, Unica Plan provides a set of predefined reports and dashboard components. The Unica Plan reports package provides additional example reports and dashboard report components that are created in IBM® Cognos®, a separate business intelligence application.
- Searches
  You can perform simple and advanced searches in Unica Plan.
- Alerts and the message board
  You can use alerts and the message board both to communicate information to other users of Unica Plan. Alerts and the message board are available for plans, programs, projects, requests, assets, accounts, approvals, invoices, tasks, teams, and marketing objects.
- Reading a message on the message board
  You can read messages that were previously posted to the message board, if you have permission to view that object. Messages can be posted for plans, programs, projects, assets, accounts, approvals, or invoices.
- Checklists and To-dos
  Checklists are independent of other features of Plan and you can use checklists to maintain lists of to-dos for yourself or any other user.

Approval dates

When you create an approval from a workflow task, the approval must include a Target Due Date.

Note the following behavior about the Forecast/Actual and Target dates for the approval:

If the task contains a date in either the Target End Date or Forecast/Actual End Date field, the system automatically copies the date into the Target Due Date for the approval.
If you modify the date in the Target Due Date field, the Forecast/Actual End Date in the corresponding workflow approval task is updated with the new date.

Note the following methods that Unica Plan uses to calculate duration when the project owner enters the start and end dates for an approval from a workflow task.

If the duration is less than what is specified in the approval for each approver, an equal amount of time is deducted from each required approver.
If the duration is more than what is specified in the approval for each approver, an equal amount of time is added to each required approver.
When an approver responds, the duration for that approver is not adjusted. The durations for the remaining approvers are adjusted if possible or an error message displays.
If for any reason the duration for an approver cannot be adjusted automatically, an error message displays requesting different values.
The Forecast/Actual Duration field in the workflow is overwritten with the sum of approver durations if the duration for an approver is changed and saved.
Unica Plan automatically calculates the approval start date if the Forecast/Actual duration and Forecast/Actual end date are changed.

Have feedback?
Google Analytics is used to store comments and ratings. To provide a comment or rating for a topic, click Accept All Cookies or Allow All in Cookie Preferences in the footer of this page.