The Planning Manager is where you can plan for new projects/shells and proposals and create forecasts for those projects/shells that are already running in Unifier. You cannot administer planned projects/shells the way you administer real projects/shells in Unifier; however, you can manage the planning phases for these projects/shells as business processes in Unifier using the same functions used by other business processes. Planned projects/shells can include cost sheets, resource sheets, funding sheets, and other typical business processes; but certain data, such as dates and monies, can be viewed as future forecasts.
You can have a Planning Manager at both the company and project/shell levels.
The Planning Sheet is central to Planning Manager functions. This sheet contains information about all the plans (planning items) being considered by your company. It is from this sheet that you access, create, update, and import or export the company’s plans. From the planning sheet, you can automatically update plans with changes made on the planning sheet. Reciprocally, you can refresh the planning sheet with changes made to individual plans. In addition, planning sheets can be configured to compare planned data with actual rolled-up data from Unifier projects/shells related to each planning item.
Using a Project/Shell Creation type of business process, you can create new projects or shells for planning items when they reach a certain status or condition. If the Project/Shell Creation business process includes a Planning Item Picker, you can link new projects/shells with planning items. Instead of linking a planning item to a project in the Planning Manager, this business process will automatically create the link 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.
Using Unifier’s snapshot feature, you can take a "picture" of the planning sheet at any point in time. This is a way of "drilling down" into the planning process to expose specific plans or planning phases for particular attention.
In Unifier, the Planning Items node is where you create new plans and proposals, import plans from outside software 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, you 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.