On the other hand, Aldi Nord now successfully runs SAP HANA/Retail. The at the same time attempted (and internally highly fought against) move from decentral to central organization is probably what killed Lidl's SAP project.
[1] suggests that part of the problem is that Lidl's business processes were non-standard, and Lidl decided, rather than change their processes to match what SAP's solution supported, to instead customise SAP's solution to support their non-standard processes – and that was the point at which the project came undone, the SAP customisations couldn't scale to high turnover (but surely vanilla/uncustomised SAP Retail would not have had this problem)
Lidl's non-standard processes may well be a big part of their business success. But maybe that was a sign they shouldn't have gone with an off-the-shelf solution like SAP, and should have stuck with their legacy in-house system, or tried to build a custom next generation in-house system. And their experience isn't necessarily transferable to another business whose processes might be more standard, or who might have more flexibility to alter their processes to meet the needs of an off-the-shelf solution. And if they'd gone for some other off-the-shelf solution instead of SAP (such as Oracle or Infor), they might have had just as many problems – the more customisation heavy an ERP implementation project is, the greater the risk of failure.
