Nope, but from what I hear the systems are old, organically grown complex systems (see other commenters here that worked for/with SAP and shared their story). I doubt Lidl can quit on SAP altogether, it's rather the question of how to achieve the business goals with SAP in use.
Seems like all the more reason to hire a couple more employees than trying to save an infinitesimal amount playing games to pretend that they’re contractors
Why should freelancers be forced to become employees? And how is Lidl supposed to find suitable candidates, if - as I said - the most capable and suitable ones, are freelancers?
Who said anything about forcing anyone? The problem described was LIDL sacking a bunch of people who had worked exclusively for them for 6 months and presumably would have been happy to continue doing so, except that LIDL would have had to pay a little more tax.
Also, if you can’t find people to hire for a mission critical system, that’s a strong sign that you either need to not make it critical or start aggressively investing in training — which is still considerably cheaper than a 500M write-off.