Home
User Guide
With Unica Plan, you organize the people, tasks, and budget for marketing programs, while you reduce costs and time to market.
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.
Dashboard portlets
To manage your dashboards and add portlets to them, click Dashboard > Create Dashboard.
Quick link portlets
Quick links are pre-defined links to Unica products. Some quick links enable users to perform basic actions in the Unica product within the dashboard, without navigating to the product. You can configure portlets that contain a set of quick links that you choose.

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.
- 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.
  - Filtering data with search and select
    You can filter the data in reports in different ways, depending on the report. Use search and select filters to perform a search and then choose which results to use for the report.
  - Dates filters
    To narrow the date range for your report, use the Date filter.
  - Status and type filters
    Status and type filters limit reports to include only tasks with the selected status or type.
  - Multi-object reports
    When the Unica Plan reports package is installed, you can generate reports from the Analytics Home page.
  - Single-object reports
    The single-object reports are available from the Analysis tab of projects, programs, and plans. For these reports, you are reporting on that single object.
  - Dashboard portlets
    To manage your dashboards and add portlets to them, click Dashboard > Create Dashboard.
    - Unica Plan list portlets
      If the Unica Plan reports package is not installed, you still have access to the Unica Plan list portlets that are available on your dashboard.
    - Quick link portlets
      Quick links are pre-defined links to Unica products. Some quick links enable users to perform basic actions in the Unica product within the dashboard, without navigating to the product. You can configure portlets that contain a set of quick links that you choose.
    - Unica Plan IBM Cognos report portlets
      The following table describes the Unica Plan dashboard portlets that are available after the Unica Insights is installed or the Cognos Unica Plan Reports package for Cognos is installed.
    - Custom portlet to show standard or saved search
- 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.

Quick link portlets

Quick links are pre-defined links to Unica products. Some quick links enable users to perform basic actions in the Unica product within the dashboard, without navigating to the product. You can configure portlets that contain a set of quick links that you choose.

Quick links for Unica products are installed when the product is installed. As of the 9.0.0 release, only Unica Plan provides quick links. The same security considerations apply for quick links as for pre-defined portlets.

To add a quick links portlet to one of your dashboards, click Manage Portlets > Create Quick Link Portlet and select the quick links you want to include.

The following table describes the quick links available when Unica Plan is installed.

Table 1. List of quick link portlets
Quicklink	Function
Create New Project Request	Opens up a popup window where you can choose a project template to create a Project Request. You can also click Continue to open the Project Request wizard in the application.
Create New Project	Opens up a popup window where you can choose a Project template to create a Project. You can also click Continue to open the Project wizard in the application.
Add Invoice	Opens the Add Invoice wizard in the application.
Projects	Opens the Project List page in the application.
Reports	Opens the Analytics > Operational Analytics page.
Resource Library	Opens the Asset Library page in the application.
Approvals	Opens the Approvals List page in the application.

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.