[woodpanel]

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.

[acdha]

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

[woodpanel]

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?

[acdha]

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.