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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.
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.

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).
  - 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.
    - Setting your start page
      The start page is the page that displays when you log in to Unica. The default start page is the default dashboard, but you can easily specify a different start page.
    - Setting your basic settings
      Use the basic settings option to choose the security policy that is used by default when you create items.
    - Setting your approvals options
      Use the approvals options to customize Unica Plan so you can view and receive information about approvals that are important to you.
    - Setting options for projects
      You can customize Unica Plan so that you receive the project information that is most important to you.
    - Optional project columns
      For Project List view pages, you can customize which columns appear in the list.
    - Rearranging columns on object lists
      You can rearrange the custom and standard columns of data on marketing object lists so you can see the most relevant data without scrolling. You can choose which custom columns to display.
    - Setting your tasks options
    - Setting your analytics options
    - Defining Out-of-office 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.

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.

The following table describes what you can customize.

Table 1. Options for customizing Unica Plan
Option	Description
Set current page as Home	Set the current page to display automatically as soon as you log in to Unica Plan.
Basic Settings	Set the security policy to apply to new items by default.
Timezone	Choose your local timezone.
Assets Options	Define the asset list to show by default.
Approvals Options	Define the approval list to show by default.
Projects Options	Define the project list and view to show by default for projects.
Tasks Options	Define the task list and view to show by default for tasks.
Analytics Options	Set a default report to display when you go to the Analytics >Analytics page, and set the Analytics home page as your login page.
Calendar/Timeline Settings	Select options to customize how you view the calendar and task milestones. See Calendar display options.
Out of Office Settings	Define whether you are in or out of the office and identify delegates. From version 12.1.4, you can schedule Out of Office for future dates.

You (or another user with the appropriate permission) can set up dashboards to show the information that you view most often. Each dashboard can include one or more "portlets" that present:

Lists of links to Unica Plan items such as Approvals Awaiting Action, Manage My Tasks, and My Alerts.
For more information, see Unica Plan list portlets.
Quick Links that provide access with a single click to options such as Create New Project or Add Invoice.
For more information, see Quick link portlets.
Reports, such as Budget by Project Type or Marketing Financial Position.
For more information, see Unica Plan report portlets.

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