This is simply unbelievable: Hertz paid Accenture $32 million for web design, and bad things then happened. Yes, the rental car company is claiming that after paying Accenture $32 million to make a website that the consulting firm could not deliver the product. Hertz now wants its money back. It reads like fiction for Accenture to be accused of such! I mean to be sued for the inability to make a decent website?
Car rental giant Hertz is suing over a website redesign from hell.
The US corporation hired monster management consultancy firm Accenture in August 2016 to completely revamp its online presence. The new site was due to go live in December 2017. But a failure to get on top of things led to a delay to January 2018, and then a second delay to April 2018 which was then also missed, we’re told.
As Hertz endured the delays, it found itself immersed in a nightmare: a product and design that apparently didn’t do half of what was specified and still wasn’t finished. “By that point, Hertz no longer had any confidence that Accenture was capable of completing the project, and Hertz terminated Accenture,” the car rental company complained in a lawsuit [PDF] lodged against Accenture in New York this month.
Hertz is suing for the $32m it paid Accenture in fees to get to that aborted stage, and it wants more millions to cover the cost of fixing the mess. “Accenture never delivered a functional website or mobile app,” Hertz claimed.
Accenture told El Reg on Tuesday this week it believes Hertz’s lawsuit is “without merit.”
Among the most mind-boggling allegations in Hertz’s filed complaint is that Accenture didn’t incorporate a responsive design, in which webpages automatically resize to accommodate the visitor’s screen size whether they are using a phone, tablet, desktop, or laptop.
That has been standard website practice for years and was even included in the contract that was signed, but the boffins at Accenture decided that only desktop and mobile versions were needed, according to Hertz. When the rental giant’s execs asked where the tablet version was, Accenture “demanded hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional fees to deliver the promised medium-sized layout.”
It actually gets worse.
But this gives us a window into what it costs to have those great websites we like to shop, and patronize, in top leading global companies. Your $500 budget in Lagos will not cut it!
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