Bucks County Community College sues tech company for breach of contract

Officials at Bucks County Community College in Newtown, Pa., have filed a breach of

contract suit against a Minnesota tech company that allegedly failed to integrate an information management system with the school's established software.

The college seeks more than $360,000 in damages from Augusoft, Inc., in Minneapolis, the amount the company pledged the school would see returned from the investment after the Lumens program had been implemented.

According to the complaint, Bucks County Community College entered into an agreement with Augusoft in December 2012 that said the defendants would integrate its service management software with the school's enterprise resource planning software, called Colleague. Accessed by students and faculty, Colleague allows the users to register and pay for courses, obtain transcripts and manage the operation of the school's functions.

The suit says that Augusoft advertised Lumens as a centrally hosted software service program that would help the school streamline business processes and make data analysis easier to obtain. According to the complaint, Augusoft representatives assured the plaintiffs that the integration with Colleague would be possible.

Bucks County Communityy College has paid Augusoft more than $164,000 for the licensing, implementation and software maintenance of the program and has never seen the return on the investment, the claim says.

According to the complaint, Augusoft set July 1, 2013, as the go-live date for the new systems, but almost immediately faced problems with the integration. The suit says that several meetings were held to identify the problems, but the solutions could not be created and implemented. Augusoft missed the first go-live deadline and pushed it back to Sept. 2.

In August 2013, it was clear that Augusoft would not be able to make the revised deadline, and a meeting was held between the two parties to formulate a new project plan with an adjusted go-live date of Dec. 20.

The integration problems persisted for Augusoft, placing the December deadline in jeopardy. Representatives from Bucks County Community College requested a partial demonstration of the system on Dec. 16, but Augusoft was unable to meet the request.

It was not until April 2014 that the plaintiffs were able to conduct a partial test of the integrated system. The demonstration succeeded without incident, but in the days following more problems popped up, preventing the program from entering the next phase of development.

The plaintiffs finally gave up on the integration in July 2014, disconnecting Augusoft's access to the Colleague software. The suit claims that the school spent time, money and resources to assist with the integration and seeks relief from the damages lost to the failed endeavor.

The complaint accuses Augusoft of intentionally misleading its ability to integrate the software and fraudulently entered into an agreement with the school. The claim says that the defendants used Bucks County Community College's time, money, resources and tools to build a product it claimed to have already built.

The plaintiffs are represented by Steven Jones of Begley, Carlin & Mandio in Langhorne, Pa.

The federal case ID is 2:14-cv-07143-JP.