22 October 2004 Car rental conglomerate Avis Europe has scrapped a PeopleSoft ERP system that was found to be incompatible with its global IT systems, costing the company €45 million (£31m).

The system was intended to replace a green screen system that dated back to the 1970s, but having purchased PeopleSoft licenses in 2003, Avis Europe has decided to halt the rollout. The system was expected to improve operating margins through integrating computer systems across Avis European branches.

“We are very disappointed that major IT parts of the project have incurred significant exceptional costs and will not deliver the anticipated benefits,” said Murray Hennessy, CEO of Avis Europe. “A decision has been taken to terminate the development as quickly as practicable.”

In an interview in July 2003, Avis Europe’s VP of IT, Mittu Sridhara, told Information Age: “We require a way of automating business processes in [certain] areas, and in particular, finance. We think the best way to achieve close integration of our business processes is by standardising on a single stack of enterprise applications from a single vendor. This is why Avis Europe recently invested in applications from PeopleSoft.”

PeopleSoft has confirmed that Avis Europe had purchased software licences, but said it had not been responsible for the implementation.