Why does buckminster not resolve my passed JVM argument?

Question

I have a jenkins job which uses buckminster to build an eclipse product.
At the beginning I have an "Extended Choice Parameter" where the "customer" key can be selected.
In the buckminster configuration I use this "customer" variable to select the right cquery:
import '${WORKSPACE}/source/scodi-customer/${customer}/server/features/ch.scodi.${customer}.server.feature/site.cquery'
Since the variable "customer" is per default not available in the commands, I added the following to the "JVM arguments":
-Dcustomer=${customer}
This all used to work well, but now I updated the server and build environment from Java 1.7 32-Bit to Java 1.8 64-Bit. Since then I get the following error trying to build:
java.io.FileNotFoundException: [Path to job]\source\scodi-customer\${customer}\server\features\ch.scodi.${customer}.server.feature\site.cquery (The system cannot find the path specified)
Before the variable was resolved fine.
Is this a buckminster or java8 problem, not being able to resolve the ${customer} variable? Is there maybe another (cleaner) way to pass the variable to the buckminster configuration?
I did some further testing and added the following to the JVM arguments, I get the same exception referring to a missing ${customer}. It looks to me that JVM arguments are ignored.
-Dcustomer=CUSTOMER

Answer 1

Finally I found a workaround.
I had to rename my "customer" variable to "CUSTOMER", now it is resolved in the buckminster command area:
From:
import '${WORKSPACE}/source/scodi-customer/${customer}/server/features/ch.scodi.${customer}.server.feature/site.cquery'
To:
import '${WORKSPACE}/source/scodi-customer/${CUSTOMER}/server/features/ch.scodi.${CUSTOMER}.server.feature/site.cquery'
Also my JVM parameters from:
-Dcustomer=${customer}
To:
-Dcustomer=${CUSTOMER}
Found out the JVM parameters are not relevant to the buckminster command interface but are used later in "cspex" files.
Running Jenkins on a Windows machine this might be the Problem...
So the actual problem was the naming of the "Extended Choice Parameter", not being capitalized.