Hertz customer sues Accenture integrator, claims $ 32 + million for defective site upgrade

Original author: Kieren McCarthy
The integrator "has never provided a functional website or mobile application."



Hertz car rental giant sues for hellish website redesign.

The American corporation hired Accenture's IT monster in August 2016 to completely upgrade its look on the Internet. The new site was supposed to earn in December 2017. The deadlines were disrupted, postponed until January 2018, and then again postponed until April 2018, which, we were told, were again disrupted.

The Hertz counterparts delayed, but ended up in a nightmare: the product and design, which clearly did not fulfill half of what was indicated, was still not finished. “At this point, Hertz was no longer confident that Accenture would be able to complete the project, and Hertz had stopped working with Accenture,” the car rental company writes in a lawsuit [PDF] against Accenture in a New York court.

Hertz is suing the $ 32 million they paid Accenture in advance to the current stage, and wants millions more to cover the cost of fixing the problems. “Accenture never provided a functional website or mobile app,” Hertz said.

Accenture colleagues told Al Reg on Tuesday (April 23) that they considered Hertz’s lawsuit “unfounded.”

One of the most overwhelming claims in the Hertz complaint is that Accenture’s result is not responsive, in which the web pages automatically change according to the size of the visitor’s screen, whether they use a phone, tablet, desktop or laptop.

This was standard website practice for many years and was even included in the signed contract, but Accenture employees decided that, according to Hertz, only desktop and mobile versions are needed. When the executive of the rental giant asked where the tablet version is, Accenture "demanded hundreds of thousands of dollars extra to develop the promised mid-size."

Further worse.

One of the points of the assignment: was the formation of a common set of components so that the company could exchange information and structures on the websites and applications of all its companies. And Accenture, well, completely ignored it, according to Hertz.

“Accenture deliberately ignored the requirement for extensibility and wrote the code so that it related to the Hertz brand in North America and could not be used for the global Hertz brand or for the Dollar and Thrifty brands,” the lawsuit said.

Defective code


Moreover, Hertz believes that the quality of the code is poor and the security nightmare is just around the corner.

“The Accenture developers wrote the code for the e-commerce website, the client side, in such a way that it led to serious security vulnerabilities and performance problems,” the lawsuit said before mentioning that “defects in the front-end development code were so common that all Accenture work on components should be discarded. "(The integrator used Angular 2.)

The lawsuit claims that Accenture decided to use Adobe AEM analytics, but did not adhere to the architecture in the code or in the file structure, "which made the application unreliable and difficult to maintain, and also made future updates complex and inefficient." We are told that the implemented Java code does not comply with the Java standard.

And then the phenomenon of the logic of management consulting, Accenture apparently told the customer that to speed up the performance of the site’s content management system, he would like to use something called “RAPID,” and told Hertz that he would have to buy licenses. Hertz bought the licenses, but it turned out that Accenture did not really know how to use the technology, and a quick fix took longer than without it.

The lawsuit said: “As Accenture project managers admitted, Accenture“ spent a lot of time struggling with the difficulties of integrating RAPID ”into the Hertz environment.”

Accenture’s colleagues were also unable to test the software, Hertz said, and when they actually did the tests, “the tests were seriously inadequate, right up to the point of misleading.” We were told that they did not test in the real world and were not involved in error handling. Among other things, despite the fact that consultants were specifically asked to provide style guides in an interactive and updatable format, rather than in PDF format, Accenture continued to provide guidance in PDF format only, Hertz complained.

When Hertz ran into consultants about a PDF problem, guess what was the answer? Yes, they wanted “hundreds of thousands of dollars extra” to cover expenses.

Everything is fixable ... for a fee


The team working on the project was dismissed, “but their replacements did not have the same level of experience, and a significant part of the knowledge was lost during the transition,” writes Hertz.

Although they missed the five-month deadline, lacking pre-built components and the burden of error code, Accenture told Hertz that an additional $ 10 million would be required to complete the project, in addition to the $ 32 million already paid. The lawsuit did not record what was the reaction of Hertz executives to this particular requirement, but we suspect that the reaction would contain profanity.

An Accenture spokeswoman told The Register: “We believe that the allegations in this lawsuit are unfounded and we intend to defend our position. As this is a current legal issue, we decline further comments. ”

Meanwhile, Hertz lawyers have requested a jury trial, and the business wants to return all the tens of millions of dollars he spent on “insufficient services and results,” as well as the “millions of dollars in extra costs that went into fixing and completing the project.” ".

And you thought you had a nightmare of website redesign ?!

Only registered users can participate in the survey. Please come in.

How do you redesign?

  • 85.1% by the forces of its employees 86
  • 8.9% We attract a large integrator 9
  • 11.8% Involve many freelancers 12

Also popular now: