Accenture loses preliminary appeal in British Gas dispute

Both parties set to battle in court in October next year

Accenture is facing £182m lawsuit by British Gas over an SAP-based Jupiter System

A High Court judge has rejected the majority of arguments in a preliminary appeal by Accentureagainst a legal claim from British Gas over an IT project implementation.

Accenture is now facing £182m lawsuit by British Gas over the SAP-based Jupiter System.

Accenture was contracted to design, supply, install and maintain the new IT system, which included an automated billing system based on pre-packaged SAP Industry Solutions–Utilities (IS-U) software in December 2005.

The parties agreed that the planned migration of two million customer accounts from existing billing systems to the new system should be conducted in two phases, comprising 1.25 million customer accounts at the end of December 2005 and 750,000 customer accounts during February 2006.

However, British Gas claims the system caused "millions of errors, which led to severe customer service problems and caused hundreds of thousands of customers to leave the company".

British Gas alleges the migration led to a spike in customer complaints

The preliminary appeal saw the High Court uphold nine out of the 10 issues that were ruled on.

British Gas argued that the implementation contained many small defects that could aggregate into one large and significant problem. Accenture wanted each issue to be taken in isolation.

“British Gas is now one step closer to holding Accenture to account for the disruption caused to our customers,” said Phil Bentley, managing director of British Gas in a statement.

However, Accenture has responded with a statement of its own: “What British Gas didn't mention in their statement is that the Court of Appeal in fact accepted a number of Accenture’s arguments,” it said.

“In particular, it reversed the High Court’s judgment on a key issue that will make it more difficult for British Gas to attribute its problems with the system to Accenture, rather than taking responsibility for fixing them itself.”

The case is is due to go to court in October 2011.