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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.
Business processes
In Unica Plan, a business process is the representation of a collection of related, structured activities (a chain of events).
Strategic planning and financial management
Unica Plan includes strategic planning and financial management.
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.

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.
  - Why use Unica Plan?
    Unica Plan, users increase the return and lower the risk of resource investments by optimizing decisions, collaborating across programs, operating more efficiently, and gaining greater visibility.
  - Unica Plan documentation and help
    Different people in your organization use Unica Plan to accomplish different tasks. Information about Unica Plan is available in a set of guides, each of which is intended for use by team members with specific objectives and skill sets.
  - Unica Plan workflow
    The workflow for Unica Plan includes creating and managing marketing objects, such as plans, programs, and projects.
  - Business processes
    In Unica Plan, a business process is the representation of a collection of related, structured activities (a chain of events).
    - Relationship of planning objects
      In Unica Plan, planning objects include plans, programs, and projects. Plans contain one or more programs, and programs contain one or more projects. Projects can contain subprojects. A budget for a plan consists of individual line items for projects and programs that roll up into the budget for the plan.
    - Plans
      A plan captures the objectives of a business unit or area for a specific time period, typically measured yearly or quarterly. A plan also serves as a container and "rollup" point for the various programs and projects that you define to meet your marketing goals.
    - Programs
      A program represents a marketing activity and is typically comprises multiple related marketing deliverables or initiatives.
    - Projects
      A project represents all of the information that is related to developing and running one or more related marketing deliverables or initiatives. This information can include a checklist or schedule of tasks that people who work on the project must complete to prepare and produce the deliverables for the project.
    - 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.
    - Teams
      A team is a group of people who work together to complete tasks across a number of different business processes. Someone in charge of a business process can assign tasks to a team, rather than an individual, when necessary.
    - Alerts
      Alerts are notifications of important events or actions you need to take regarding a program, project, a project request, asset, account, approval, or invoice. For example, an alert might remind you that a project is running behind schedule or over budget, or that an item needs your approval.
    - Attachments
      Team members can attach relevant documents to the main Unica Plan objects. An attachment is a URL, digital asset, or a file that you add to a Unica Plan object. You can add attachments to plans, programs, projects, invoices, approvals, and accounts.
    - Metrics
      Metrics are used for management reports and analysis. View metrics on the Tracking tab for plans, programs, and projects.
    - Workflows
      A workflow displays and manages the group of tasks and milestones that drives the project. Workflows efficiently meet and manage project goals.
    - Functional roles
      When you set up a project, you assign individuals to tasks based on the individuals' functional role or job role, such as writer, graphic artist, or project manager. Unica Plan uses the concept of roles as a bridge between people and tasks.
    - Security policies
      A security policy is a set of rules that govern objects that are associated with the policy, such as plans, programs, and projects. These rules indicate which types of users can view, modify, delete, or perform any of the other relevant functions for these objects.
    - Strategic planning and financial management
      Unica Plan includes strategic planning and financial management.
      - Accounts
        The finance department can use accounts to monitor the expenditures and cash flow for your business.
      - 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.
      - Cost categories
        Cost categories are used to categorize expenses into types, such as travel expense and mailing expense. Cost categories are used both when tracking invoices and creating budgets.
      - Invoices
        In Unica Plan, an invoice electronically captures a paper invoice that is submitted to a marketing department for services, time, or materials that are provided by a third-party vendor or supplier. You must manually transfer the information from the paper invoice into an Unica Plan invoice.
    - Libraries of reusable elements
      Within Unica Plan, you can store and reuse marketing items.
  - Logging into marketing software
  - Customize Unica Plan
    You can customize the Unica Plan interface to meet your needs. Customization settings are available in Unica Plan when you click Settings or Settings > Unica Plan Settings.
- 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.
- 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.

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.

Unica Plan tracks budgets of child programs and projects, although these objects can have different owners. For example, a program that is linked to a plan can have a different owner than the plan itself. As such, the person who allocates a budget from a plan down to a program can be different from the person forecasting expenses from a program up to a plan. A plan owner, such as a marketing manager, can track expected expenses from child programs, projects, and the plan budget itself, to remain responsive to budgetary needs.

Note: Budgets are available only when the Unica Plan financial module is enabled.

Fiscal year

You can view the total budget for all years, or see a detailed view for a particular year that is broken down into weeks, months, or quarters.

Unica Plan keeps budget information for the current fiscal year, the next two fiscal years, and any past fiscal years that date back to when you first installed Unica Plan.

On the plan level, to view or edit a different fiscal year, change the Fiscal Year field value on the Plan Summary tab. Linked programs and projects take the financial year from the parent plan; stand-alone programs and projects use the system's current fiscal year.

Granularity

With Unica Plan, you can break fiscal years into weeks, months, or quarters. When you create a plan, program, or project, choose the wanted increment from the Budget Granularity list on the Summary tab.

Users cannot edit budget granularity. Plans, programs, and projects with different budget granularities are not allowed to be linked together.

For example, if a plan's fiscal year is broken into months, you can only link it to programs and projects that also use months as the budget granularity. In this scenario, programs and projects with weeks or quarters as their granularity are unavailable for linking.

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