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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.
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.
Starting plans
You start a plan by changing the status. Select the status transition Start Plan. After you start a plan, all participants can work on the plan.

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.
  - Plan views
    Unica Plan organizes plans in views.
  - Summary information for plans
    On the plan Summary tab, Unica Plan lists summary information about a plan, such as status, program areas, and security policy.
  - Fiscal year of plans
    When you add or edit a plan, you choose its fiscal year from a list. You can edit budget information for the fiscal year you choose.
  - Adding a plan
    When you add a plan, you become an owner of that plan.
  - Adding and removing program areas
    Program areas are subsections of plans, allowing programs that are linked to the plan to be arranged into logical subgroups. In Unica Plan, administrators create the program areas.
  - Linking a program to a plan
    After you create a plan, you can link existing programs to it. When you link a program to a plan, all the plan participants receive an email message that informs them of the link.
  - Creating a program from a plan
    You can create a new program when you are in a plan. Unica Plan links the new program to the plan. The program areas that you choose in the program creation process are the program areas that are currently defined for the plan.
  - Removing a program from a plan
    Before you can delete a plan, you must remove any programs that are linked to it. Removing the link does not delete the program from Unica Plan, it only breaks the link.
  - Starting plans
    You start a plan by changing the status. Select the status transition Start Plan. After you start a plan, all participants can work on the plan.
  - Deleting a plan
    You can delete a plan from the Plan List page or from the plan Summary tab.
- 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.

Starting plans

You start a plan by changing the status. Select the status transition Start Plan. After you start a plan, all participants can work on the plan.

About this task

To start a plan, complete the following steps.

Procedure

Go to the Summary tab of the plan you want to start.

Click Operations > Plans. Click Actions() and select a view (such as My Plans or All Plans) that includes plans with "Not Started" as the status.
Click Change Status and select Start Plan or Start Plan with comments from the menu.
Optional: If you chose Start Plan with comments, type your comments and click Continue.

Results

The plan status changes to Green circle In Progress.

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