Home
User Guide
With Unica Plan, you organize the people, tasks, and budget for marketing programs, while you reduce costs and time to market.
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.
Timeline view of the calendar
If you choose a timeline view, you can choose from several date ranges. The screen can display data for a single week, up to data for an entire year.

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.
- 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.
  - Customizing the calendar appearance
    The calendar displays a time-centric view of your business processes. You can customize the appearance of the calendar to suit the needs of your organization.
  - Timeline view of the calendar
    If you choose a timeline view, you can choose from several date ranges. The screen can display data for a single week, up to data for an entire year.
  - Text or graphical calendar views
    The calendar views display data for a selected month. The view contains a cell for each day of the selected month. The cell for a day contains either a list of items active on the day (text) or a portion of a horizontal bar for each active item (graphical).
  - Publishing the calendar
    You can save a snapshot of the calendar at a certain moment in time. When you publish the calendar, you chose which information you want to display and how you want to display it.
- 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.

Timeline view of the calendar

If you choose a timeline view, you can choose from several date ranges. The screen can display data for a single week, up to data for an entire year.

The timeline view displays a grid-like view of the objects, such as projects, programs, or plans that you selected and filtered (for example, Active Projects). The objects are organized by a unit of time, depending on which timeline view you selected.

Each object is displayed in a horizontal bar across its date range. The name of the object displays on the bar.

Note: If you select Enable Color Coding from the calendar view options screen, the bar for each object is displayed in a color that is based on an attribute you chose.

Choose a date-range for the timeline.

Week: displays one week, with each day listed as a column. The starting day is either Sunday or Monday depending on the option that is selected in the Calendar/Timeline Settings page.
Month: displays a single calendar month. Each day is listed as a column, and days are grouped into weeks.
Quarter: displays three calendar months. Each week is listed as a column, and those weeks are grouped into months.
Fiscal Year: displays a fiscal year. The starting month depends on a configuration setting, firstMonthInFiscalYear. Each month is listed as a column, and the months are grouped into quarters.
Calendar Year: displays a calendar year, which starts in January and ends in December. Each month is listed as a column, and the months are grouped into quarters.

Note: Any day that is specified as non-work time has its column that is disabled. Additionally, the name of the non-work time (for example, "Labor Day") displays when you point to the date. This feature is not available when the time scale is Quarter, Fiscal Year, or Calendar Year.

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.