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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.
Common tasks
Statuses of business processes
The status of a business process quickly informs users of where the business process is in its lifecycle. You change the status by selecting a transition.
Changing the status of business processes
Statuses identify the progress of business processes. To move a business process through the lifecycle, you must change the status.

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
  - Attachments
    You can attach relevant documents to Unica Plan objects, such as plans, programs, and projects. The Attachments tab of an object contains links to all files or URLs related to the object.
  - Statuses of business processes
    The status of a business process quickly informs users of where the business process is in its lifecycle. You change the status by selecting a transition.
    - Changing the status of business processes
      Statuses identify the progress of business processes. To move a business process through the lifecycle, you must change the status.
    - Changing the status of multiple projects or requests
      You can change the status of one or more projects or requests simultaneously to improve efficiency.
  - Disabled attribute values
    Throughout Unica Plan, users select an item or items from a list. Over time, the items in the lists can change; administrators can add, remove, or disable items from lists.
  - Selecting resources
    Throughout Unica Plan, users can select people and teams as resources.
  - Printing objects
    You can print the current page for many Unica Plan objects.
  - Exporting information in Microsoft Excel format
    You can export information from Unica Plan to an Excel spreadsheet for programs, projects, and project requests.
- 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.

Changing the status of business processes

Statuses identify the progress of business processes. To move a business process through the lifecycle, you must change the status.

About this task

The following procedure describes how to change the status for plans, programs, projects, requests, marketing objects, and approvals.

Note: Your administrator can set up Unica Plan to send an alert to owners and members of a process when its status changes.

Procedure

Select the type of object you want to work with from the navigational menus.
For example, to work with a plan click Operations > Plans.
Click the name of the object you want to change.
Click Change Status and select a transition from the menu.
Most status transitions are available with comments and without comments. To add more information, select an option with comments. To change the status immediately, select an option without comments.
Note: You can only select transitions to Finish or Cancel an object with comments.
The available transitions depend on the status of the object.
- For objects that are Not Started, Start <object> changes the status to In Progress. For requests and approvals, select Submit <object>.
- For objects that are In Progress, Pause <object> changes the status to On Hold. For approvals, select Stop Review.
- For objects that are On Hold, Continue <object> changes the status to In Progress.
- For objects that are In Progress, Finish <object> changes the status to Completed. Objects in this status cannot be changed to any other status, except for projects. You can reconcile projects to open them again after you change the status to Completed.
- For objects that are Not Started or In Progress, Cancel <object> changes the status to Canceled. Select this option to cancel the object permanently. Objects in this status cannot be changed to any other status, except for projects. You can reconcile projects to open them again after you change the status to Canceled.
Optional: If you selected a transition option "with comments," enter appropriate comments. Click Continue.

Results

If you do not enter comments, the status changes immediately after you select a transition from the menu. If you enter comments, the status changes after you enter your comments.

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