The Planning Manager provides sponsoring companies the ability to create, organize, manage, and update all company or project/shell planning initiatives from conception to completion. It supports the ability to define unlimited number of planning categories, such as capital project planning, IT planning, resource planning, etc., providing a flexible method for managing and organizing any type of planning initiative.
The Planning Manager provides the flexibility of defining unique planning item property forms and planning sheets. Each planning sheet can be configured with any number of columns to capture and manage data for all planned items.
In addition, the planning sheet can be configured to compare planned data with actual rolled up data from Unifier projects/shells, related to each planned initiative.
The Planning Sheet is central to Planning Manager functions. Each planning item "type" (such as a capital plan or a campus remodel) can have one or more planning sheets that contain information about the plans of this type being considered by your company or project. It is from these sheets that you can access, create, update, and import or export company plans. Business processes designed for planning items can roll up information onto the planning sheets. In addition, Project/Shell Creation types of business processes can be designed to create new projects or shells for planning items when they reach a certain status or condition. If the Project/Shell Creation BP includes a Planning Item Picker, you can link new projects/shells with a planning item. At runtime in Unifier, this BP will automatically create a link to the planning item when the project/shell is created, and data will begin to roll up to the Planning Sheet from the business processes in this project/shell.
In Unifier, the Planning Items node is where you create new plans and proposals, import plans from outside applications, export a plan template, and link a plan to a running project or shell in Unifier.
The Planning Sheets node is where you create and manage planning sheets. A planning sheet can contain data for one or multiple plans and proposals. From the planning sheet, users can automatically update individual plans with data added to the planning sheet and refresh the data on the sheet, such as changes to dates or cost numbers.