An installation of HCL Unica products is complete when you install, configure, and deploy the HCL Unica products . The Installation Guide provides detailed information about installing, configuring, and deploying the products.

Unica Optimize is a web-based extension of Unica Campaign that allows you to determine the optimal contact strategy for each customer. You can optimize over time, looking across the proposed offers and channels across multiple marketing campaigns.

Unica Optimize can optimize your marketing campaign and improve response from customers, but only if you know what you want to optimize. You need a plan, the data to support the plan, and an implementation method.

A Unica Optimize session is a combination of rules and scores that apply to a set of proposed contacts.

Unica Optimize uses the rules and scores you define in your Unica Optimize session to mathematically determine the best combination of final contacts you use across your marketing campaigns.

You use scores in Unica Optimize to rank possible offers for each customer using a patent-pending optimization algorithm. The higher the score you assign to a contact, the more desirable you are making that contact. Unica Optimize maximizes the sum of scores in the OCT.

The optimization process involves generating a list of proposed contacts in Unica Campaign and sending these contacts to Unica Optimize to produce optimized contacts.

After you optimize the proposed contacts, you must retrieve the optimized contacts from Unica Optimize to send marketing communications to these contacts.

For each production run or test run, Unica Optimize generates a number of reports. These reports help you understand what happened during the optimization process by providing analyses pre- and post-optimization.

There are many aspects of Unica Optimize you can configure to improve performance.

This section describes the Unica Optimize configuration properties that are found on the Configuration page.

There are common configuration issues that can interfere with running Optimize. There are many more complex situations with a mixture of configuration settings, rule configuration, and data that might cause unexpected results in your Optimize session. The following sections provide details on troubleshooting and fixing these scenarios.

Keep in mind these points when you make data or configuration decisions, if you are concerned about performance.

The Unica Optimize system tables document is intended to help your company understand the Unica Optimize data model for integration purposes.

The system table reference provides details on each of the Unica Optimize system tables. The data types that are indicated in the following tables are generic types that may be different in your Campaign installation, depending on the database that is used for the system tables. The Unica Optimize system tables are stored in a database that was created before the Campaign installation. The database can have any name. The ODBC or native connection provides a connection to the database.