British Gas to sue Accenture over faulty IT system

12 May 2008

Energy giant British Gas is taking legal action against IT firm Accenture, which it claims was responsible for a reported £182 million loss incurred in sorting out a billing mess in one of its largest customer service debacles.

Centrica said it was suing Accenture, the global consultancy group, over the failed IT system which Accenture built and installed for its British Gas division.

Centrica claims that problems with the IT system – Project Jupiter - were at the root of a collapse in British Gas's customer service levels that cost the company thousands of customers during 2006 and 2007.

Centrica said the system faults became evident after the roll-out of the new customer billing system during 2006-07and it severely impacted on British Gas's customer service operations.

As a consequence, it said ''British Gas was forced to make significant investments to address the system failures and these investments are ongoing. It also incurred significant additional staff costs to manage the customer service issues.''

The company claims to have lost a million customers in  2006 alone.
 
`Project Jupiter' also forced British Gas to hire 2,500 extra staff and invest millions more pounds to fix the problems and make it work.