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 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.
Completing approval processes
If the approval process does not have the Enable approval auto completion flag enabled, only the owner can change its status to Completed. Marking approval processes complete helps organize approval processes. Approval processes with a status of Completed display only in the All Approvals view.

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.
  - 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.
    - Creating Approval Processes
      You create approval processes to organize the review process. After you create the review process, you can assign approvers and add approval items.
    - Assigning Approvers
      When you create an approval, you add the people who must offer feedback. Approvers can be required or optional. After they are added, Unica Plan informs approvers of the status and changes to the approval process.
    - Adding approval items
      Add the items that require feedback to the approval process, such as images, documents, and templates.
    - Submitting approval processes for review
      After you add an approval process, you must submit the approval to notify the approvers that they take action. Submitting the approval begins the review process.
    - Methods of evaluating approvals
      When you are notified that it is your turn to review, you can evaluate the approval process in the Unica Plan user interface, through the Approval Portlet, or on a mobile device.
    - Evaluating approval processes
      When it is your turn, you provide feedback on the approval process and any approval line items. You provide feedback by approving or denying the approval process and individual line items. You can also add comments or markup for more detailed feedback.
    - Approval portlet
      The approval portlet allows you to access the approvals that require your response from your dashboard.
    - Evaluating approval processes in the Approval Portlet
      Use the approval portlet to quickly respond to approvals directly on your dashboard. You can approve all approvals that are waiting for your response with one click, or assess approval processes and approval line items one at a time.
    - Mobile features in Unica Plan
      Unica Plan includes limited features that are optimized for a mobile browser. Unica Plan now includes support to evaluate approval processes on mobile devices.
    - Post complete response
      To finish an approval process with multiple approval items, you click Post complete response. To finish an approval process without approval items, you click Post Feedback. After you click Post complete response or Post Feedback, you cannot change your response to the approval process.
    - Modifying approval processes
      The owner of an approval process can modify the approval process after it is created and even after it is submitted. The owner can add new items for approval, or assign new approvers. The owner can also delete items and approvers, or update existing items to be reviewed.
    - Canceling approval processes
      You can cancel the approval process at any time. Canceling the approval process does not delete the approval. You might decide to cancel rather than delete an approval process if you think you might need details from the approval process in the future.
    - Copying approval processes
      You can copy an approval process to create another approval process that is similar to an existing one. You can make a copy of the existing approval process and modify the copy, leaving the original approval process intact.
    - Deleting an approval
      As the owner of the approval process, you can delete it at any time.
    - Completing approval processes
      If the approval process does not have the Enable approval auto completion flag enabled, only the owner can change its status to Completed. Marking approval processes complete helps organize approval processes. Approval processes with a status of Completed display only in the All Approvals view.
    - Putting approval processes on hold
      After you submit an approval process for review, you can put the approval process on hold. You might put an approval process on hold to revise the approval items and request reapproval. Putting an approval on hold is different from canceling a review of an approval process because you can modify it and continue the review.
    - Reactivating approval processes that are on hold
      After you put an approval process on hold, you can reactivate it to resume the review process.
  - 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.

Completing approval processes

If the approval process does not have the Enable approval auto completion flag enabled, only the owner can change its status to Completed. Marking approval processes complete helps organize approval processes. Approval processes with a status of Completed display only in the All Approvals view.

About this task

Unless the approval was created with the Enable approval auto completion flag enabled, it is entirely up to the approval owner as to when to complete the approval. If auto-completion is enabled, the approval is automatically marked Completed when the last required approver approves.

Marking the approval process complete signifies that the review is finished. The following are some examples of when you might want to mark an approval as complete.

After all approvers respond
After the Target Due Date passes
After all suggested changes to approval items are made

Procedure

Open the approval process that you want to complete.
1. Select Operations > Approvals. The My Active Approvals view displays by default.
2. If the approval process you want to complete is not available in this view, select All Approvals.
Click Change Status and select Finish Review from the menu.
Enter a comment about why you want to complete the review in the Approvals window, and click Continue.

Results

The approval now has a status of Completed; Unica Plan sends a notification that the approval process is finished.

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.