Audatex has apologized to its UK accident repair clients following an IT failure that put its AudaEnterprise estimating handling system out of action.

The collapse occurred on September 22, and left more than 3,000 bodyshops unable to complete repair estimates until the weekend.

Paul Tucker, Audatex UK managing director and chief executive, says: “While regrettable, for which again I apologize, the outage was unavoidable and I am confident that the processes that we followed are the very best in the industry to combat these types of hardware problems that can beset any software and services company.”

Tucker says its supplier, Sun Microsystems of America, had never experienced the problem before. The failure of hardware components led to conflicts at Audatex’s main database storage device, preventing repairers from completing estimates. Audatex invoked its disaster recovery plan to provide a parallel service. However, the problem was fixed before this was necessary.

“The robust nature of the Audatex AudaNet platform protected the integrity of all business data. The data held by Audatex was never at risk,” he adds.

The company has just appointed Alan Cottrill as commercial director, managing its relationships with insurers, bodyshops, manufacturers and accident management companies.

The UK’s largest dealer group, Pendragon, recently switched all its 54 bodyshops over to AudaEnterprise from the now redundant AudaWorkstation, which was switched off on September 30.