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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.
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).
Marketing object references in approvals
You add marketing object references to approvals in the same way you add them to forms and grid fields. However, the options for searching for marketing objects are slightly different.

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).
  - Offer object type
    Depending on whether you only installed Unica Plan or if you integrated Unica Campaign, you have different options for offer objects.
  - Creating marketing objects
    Marketing object types are specific to each organization. The marketing object types that are available to you and how they are organized on the menus depend upon your template creator.
  - Marketing object cross-reference report
    All projects and marketing objects contain a report that describes cross-references to and from other marketing objects. This report appears on the Analysis tab, and is titled "Marketing Object Cross-Reference."
  - Marketing object cross-reference report
    Some projects reference or modify other marketing objects.
  - Select marketing objects
    You select marketing objects by checking boxes on the Marketing Objects list page.
  - Deleting marketing objects
    If you no longer need a marketing object, you can delete it.
  - Adding marketing object references to forms or grid rows
    Forms and grids can contain columns that hold references to marketing objects. Unica Plan makes it easy to find the specific marketing object to reference in such a column.
  - Marketing object references in approvals
    You add marketing object references to approvals in the same way you add them to forms and grid fields. However, the options for searching for marketing objects are slightly different.
- 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.

Marketing object references in approvals

You add marketing object references to approvals in the same way you add them to forms and grid fields. However, the options for searching for marketing objects are slightly different.

Simple search (Search tab)

The simple search screen in the marketing object selection box for approvals contains an extra drop-down list. You use this control to select a single type of marketing object for your search. You must select one type of marketing object before you can begin the search.

Saved search (Browse tab)

The drop-down list of saved searches contains previously saved searches for all enabled marketing object types. For example, if you have marketing object types for Creatives and Envelopes, all saved searches for Creatives and Envelopes appear in the list.

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