A fixed-price data warehousing project has left the Whitbread Beer Company facing a #1m bill because it has been forced to delay ditching an ageing mainframe application for 12 months.

Last September the brewing giant signed up Informix and IBM to replace an ancient ES/9000-based sales and marketing analysis application known as SAM with a data warehouse based system codenamed Samson.

A source close to the project at Whitbread's Luton headquarters claimed: 'The project was badly specified and badly managed and now has severe problems.'

Fraser Winterbottom, Whitbread Beer Company IT director, admitted to a one-month delay to phase one of the Informix ODS database project, but claimed problems were restricted to finding the best report writing tool.

On the #1m cost of running the mainframe application, he said: 'This is a fortune. The new system will have a much lower cost of ownership and that is potentially a very big prize.'

SAM is Whitbread's core sales and marketing analysis tool with more than 3Gb of data. It was written in APL - an obscure IBM language and only delivers limited fixed-format reports.

Winterbottom said his biggest problem was getting the Informix report writer and Cognos' Powerhouse to access the database. 'Our initial aim was to roll out report writing software to 30 users in the finance and IT departments. Only 12 users have access today,' he said.

Winterbottom added: 'All database companies need to learn more about report writers. They need to be much more tightly integrated into the database.'

Terry Lawlor, technical marketing manger at Informix, said: 'We will deliver some reporting capabilities and we also work through partners.

Maybe his problem is finding the right tool.'

Winterbottom plans to spend the next month experimenting with report writing tools, and hopes to deliver access to another 60 users by October.

Eventually he would like to extend warehouse access to more than 400 retail sales managers who could log in from remote locations.