Planner

This article provides an overview of the Planner functionality in inriver.

About the planner

Planner focuses on making the planning, execution, and overview of inriver enrichment activities to a significantly easier process. The Planner not only facilitates the creation of activities, but also enables the efficient handling of all your planned campaigns, promotions and product launches.

Planner displays the work that needs to be done, and when it needs to be finished in order to meet your delivery deadlines. It also provides a timeline overview of the completeness levels of every activity that is, or needs to be, completed. It additionally provides a smart filtering functionality, helping you easily find and monitor what you are currently working on for a planned activity.

Introducing the planner

Benefits of using the planner

• It provides a holistic view of all your ongoing and planned campaigns, promotions and launches.
• It gives you reassurance that content is being finished on time.
• It provides an easy-to-use UI that helps you plan, create and monitor any aspects of your plans.
• It simplifies shared work and collaboration between team members.
• It has a web-based client for easy access to all data.

Collaboration and planning

Planner enables significantly improved team collaboration, gives a holistic view of all your marketing activities, and keeps full control over activity planning.

The real need of the marketing professional is the ability to create, plan and release great product stories. There are a lot of tools on the market that help a product-selling organization plan activities for the whole product release process. inriver combines PIM and DAM functionality with MRM/planning – a powerful combination that puts the marketer in charge of the entire product marketing process from beginning to end, making planning a natural part of the process.

Get an overview of activities

Planner focuses on making the planning, execution, and overview of inriver activities a much easier process. The Planner not only enables you to create e.g. campaigns, promotions and product launches, but also gives you an overview of all your planned activities, the work that needs to be done, and when it needs to be finished in order to meet your delivery deadlines.

It also provides a smart filtering functionality, helping you easily find and monitor the activities that you are currently working on. The Planner supports marketing teams in keeping a holistic view of every project and activity, in what order activities need to be completed, and the different dependencies each part has.

Define each step

In Planner, you can define your new campaigns, promotions etc. and set the time when they should start and stop. You can also define all the different steps that need to be completed in order for the activity to be complete.

Your team members get an overview of the ongoing activities in the various activities and their respective Completeness. They can easily drill down on each activity to see what requires action. This is also where they see their task overview, so that they know exactly what needs to be accomplished in each activity.

Enrich your content

As the Planner definition phase is completed, work is conducted in Enrich. The progress of the product enrichment work that you typically do with each activity is highlighted in the Planner overview. Each action within the activity is shown as a percentage, so that you and your team are always aware of the progress of the entire enrichment process.

Get organized

Planner makes it easier for teams and marketers to collaborate around tasks and the associated product content for managing successful marketing projects. The Planner is extremely flexible, as it can be customized to include any combination of categories, entities or values specific to the organization and visualize this to display how the company organizes campaigns or other marketing activities.

Planner is centered round a Gantt-chart view, where activities are displayed in any desired time range. From here it is easy to determine exactly how the available information should be displayed, grouped, highlighted and labeled. The enhanced filtering functionality helps you easily search and filter information by time, text or value. Access to individual activities has also been made easier, enabling you to add or edit activities directly from the overview context. Hover-over pop-ups also give immediate access to underlying information for specific activities.

Views can be saved, re-used and shared, which creates transparency and enhances collaboration between team members. It is also possible to make a PDF export of the Planner overview.

Extended export and print options

Planner provides a perfect overview and empowers teams to collaborate around the creation and management of promotions, campaigns and other marketing activities.

Using the Planner, teams will have access to all product information used in the activities, which takes planning to a completely new level. The work that goes into the planning creates new combinations of product content. The Planner has the possibility to easily make exports so that you can get the details of your plan into an Excel file.

In addition, exporting the activities overview (Gantt chart) as a PDF is only a matter of clicking a button. You can also derive data fields (date) to enable better and more granular filtering.

With planning capabilities available in a PIM, vendors can now start their product marketing process by planning campaigns, assortments and any other marketing activities on the same platform as they manage the product information.

Having set the project scope, milestones, budget and schedule as the metrics to determine project success from the start, users can easily see the full plan and critical path ahead. Based on this, they can easily keep track of, enrich and publish the right content into the right channel at the right time.

How to use the planner

There are several situations where inriver Planner will prove to be a valuable tool for a marketing team or organization, providing a central resource for global and local planning and execution.

A typical scenario is campaign management. Here a framework is created by extending the inriver Elastic Data Model with all the dimensions needed, for supporting the execution of both global and local marketing activities.

This makes it easy to visualize and monitor any marketing initiative, have an overview of what needs to be achieved over time, keep track of central and local activities, see what resources are needed, track the hours that need to be allocated, and monitor the budget and the cost associated with every activity.

You can also use the Planner for mapping activities against the various media channels used in the campaigns. With the flexibility of the Planner, teams and individuals are empowered to define and save views, providing easy and quick access to relevant information when collaborating on marketing activities.

Further reading

Have you seen Inriver add-on functionalities?

Editing an activity in planner

Adding a milestone to an activity in planner

Setting up the model for planner

Configuring planner

Tips for planner implementation

Viewing the completeness of an activity in planner