UW Research

July 24, 2025

SAGE Status, Best Practices & Targets for Improvement

The following email was sent to the MRAM and SAGE user lists on Thursday, July 24, 2025. A companion email was also sent to Principal Investigators.

ORIS remains committed to improving the SAGE Suite’s performance, especially within SAGE Budget. We are grateful for the partnership and feedback from both campus and business unit users — your reports assist us with diagnosing and monitoring performance. We are aware that SAGE’s current state is significantly affecting your work.

What’s the current status of SAGE?

At present, the following are the most impacted areas of degraded performance:

  • SAGE Budget: SAGE Budget is experiencing slowness, refresh pop-ups, or timeouts during line item entry and saving, especially with personnel. Changing F&A settings on an existing budget also may trigger slow performance. We’ve seen a general pattern that the larger the budget — consisting of many personnel and worksheets — the more likely it is to experience issues.
  • Award Setup and Modification Requests Approvals & Returns: Users approving and/or returning ASRs and MODs may experience long processing times and periodic timeouts.

If you are experiencing issues in other areas of SAGE or when attempting other tasks, please contact us at sagehelp@uw.edu.

What recent improvements have been released?

The SAGE team has released incremental improvements over the past few weeks:

  • SAGE Budget:
    • Reduced frequency of locking errors and refresh pop-ups.
    • Streamlined worksheet settings saving.
    • Refactored slower performing code (ongoing effort).
  • Throughout SAGE:
    • Memory configurations have been optimized.

What may improve my experience in SAGE?

For better performance, we recommend considering the following approaches to minimize your chances of encountering workflow errors:

  • ASRs: Users will typically experience better performance if using a categorical totals budget, especially in the personnel section. This consists of listing the PI and a single cost row for the full personnel-related amount. Learn more about creating a categorical totals budget.
  • eGC1s & SAGE Budget: Since use of SAGE Budget is optional for proposals, departments may decide to use Excel for the near future. Large proposal budgets with many personnel and worksheets may be reasonable targets for using Excel.

Recommendation: Please also allow more time for completing applications or Award Setup Requests, especially those with large or complex budgets.

What’s next?

Unfortunately, the issues are complex in cause, with many factors contributing to degraded performance. ORIS anticipates extensive changes to SAGE over time, but the team is focused on releasing frequent updates to incrementally improve performance as quickly as possible.

The following are the SAGE team’s top priorities for fixes:

  • Budget Personnel Entry: Continue to troubleshoot intermittent timeouts when retrieving personnel data (e.g., salary calculations).
  • Budget Line Item Entry: Optimize saving approach to avoid delays when saving new or updated items.
  • Budget Worksheet Settings: Eliminate budget recalculations on fields not impacting amounts. Evaluate an alternate saving approach for bundling changes.
  • Budget Data Entry: Introduce a visual indicator when a save, page load, or refresh is still in progress so that users do not mistakenly navigate away.
  • ASRs & MODs: Improve efficiency of approval processing and reduce refresh pop-up errors. Refine calls to pull data, improving performance for OSP and GCA.

Again, we apologize for the disruption to your work. We are grateful for your continued partnership, feedback, and support as we stabilize SAGE following our necessary move to the cloud. Please reach out to us at sagehelp@uw.edu with your questions, concerns, or issues you’ve noted not covered in this email.