Grupo Arania has continued to invest in IT infrastructure to guarantee security and availability
Txema Pereira Otiñano
Chief Information Officer (CIO) of Grupo Arania.
Interview conducted in June 2026
Although the implementation of ERP software throughout all its companies is now complete, Grupo Arania’s investment in technology has not come to an end, quite the opposite; in fact, according to the head of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) teams, “it’s not stopping, we’ll never stop”. Txema Pereira is proud of the investments the group and the IT team are making to minimise risks and guarantee the availability of the technological infrastructure, and mentions some of the key factors that enable them to retain talent: the “attention, protection and consideration towards people”. “What people appreciate most is knowing that the group won’t leave them in the lurch if things go wrong. And of course, this is in addition to providing motivating challenges”, he states.
Question. From an efficiency standpoint, what has the implementation of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) in all the Group’s companies entailed?
Answer. I still prefer the old name for these tools, which was “Integrated Management Software”, as to me it describes it better. This software forces all nodes of the company to cooperate so that the transactions people make are all in a database and within workflows that involve the whole company. From the moment the sales rep enters an order to when Logistics ship a product; this is all linked and, obviously, leads to cooperation and efficiency. The implementation of ERP in all the Group’s companies has been an enormous milestone: it’s the culmination of a project that began in 2017 and was successfully completed this year with the incorporation of Lamincer.
Q. And from an infrastructure and telecommunications perspective? Was the integration complex for a group with four Business Lines, a total of seven differentiated working environments and various offices in different countries?
A. It was, because the standards for redundant availability we look for are complex. Grupo Arania has given each work site a modern, powerful, secure, high-availability Data Processing Centre (DPC), that’s that room that’s always cold and full of cables and electronics. And our cloud infrastructure works in the same way. This provision depends not only on the technical staff’s good work, which has to be excellent, but also on the group’s investment capacity, and in this case it has given its all to invest in IT infrastructure. That level of investment, for example, has made it possible for us to now have generator sets in three companies, so that, within the unfortunate situation of the blackout a year ago, the IT in three production plants was able to keep running throughout. Achieving this high level of availability and replicating it seven times was a significant challenge that was made possible by the IT teams that implemented it, and monitor it on a daily basis.
We do a ‘disaster recovery’ every year, a simulation to check we’re able to restore it fully within 12 hours, including the industrial side.
Q. What has it taken, in terms of resources?
A. It’s an ongoing task; this year we’re renewing the firewalls, which entails seven scheduled deployments… that’s a lot of hours, it’s very hard to estimate because the monitoring is ongoing. Every day we check the backups have been made correctly, monitor that the whole infrastructure is working… make a daily physical check that all the components are working, we have software that monitors them and receives alarms for any alerts…. It’s been a show of technological investment. Today we’re still monitoring that everything is running smoothly. For example, we do a disaster recovery every year, which is a restore simulation that the group’s systems administrators run, and we estimate that we can complete the full restore in less than 12 hours, including the industrial side.
Q. There are times when this type of almost preventive work goes unnoticed by other parties in the group. In this case, is this work acknowledged?
A. At Grupo Arania we’re lucky that the owners and the VP, CEO and the Managing Directors are very sensitive to the efforts made by the IT team. Even when something fails, they always start by acknowledging the effort made.
Everything is redundant, so if a component fails in our DPC, the company can keep working until we receive replacements for the damaged components.
Q. What does this process entail within the commitment to the Smart Factory in which Grupo Arania is immersed?
A. Training and stability. Here in particular the high availability of the infrastructure has played a fundamental role because the outages of the DPC themselves have been greatly reduced, as has the impact on industrial and logistics processes in turn. We’re dealing with much fewer incidents than before and that’s consequence of high availability. Everything is duplicated and this benefits efficiency: if a component in our DPC fails, the Smart Factory isn’t affected because the technology keeps running and this buys us time to receive the replacements for the damaged components from our partners.
We’re still progressing in the development of our management software, our infrastructure, in securing everything… Despite the investment in recent years it’s not stopping, we’ll never stop.
Q. This implementation is a milestone in the group’s technological evolution. What other initiatives is it involved in?
A. All of them. Technological innovation never stops and our evolution doesn’t either. What other processes are we involved in? All those that are related to our activity and have a ROI, or that we’re involved in due to changes in regulatory frameworks. If you’re in this profession, you have to be motivated by ongoing training and constant change, and it’s always been that way. I started working in 1997 and in my first 5 years of work experience I experienced, among many other things, two ERP implementations, Y2K (which was fun, it was like the world was going to come to a halt and the government decreed a crisis office on New Year’s Eve with a minister heading it), the advent of the Internet and everything it transformed, the new Ethernet and TCP/IP or Client-Server architecture, the universalisation of mobile telephony, new storage models substituting the traditional tapes, and the implementation of the euro instead of the peseta. And we’re still going today.
Now we’re all very focused on Automation (we have now automated almost 4,000 human hours) and AI among many other projects, but in spite of the work and the investment in recent years, we’re still evolving because this world isn’t stopping, and we’ll never stop.
The value of the IT teams is our ability to carry out consultancy work that provides value to the company.
Q. To what extent is this automation compatible with personal development, which constitutes one of the mainstays of Grupo Arania?
A. The greatest value we can achieve in the IT team is that companies see us not only as technical staff, but also as internal consultancy. Technology is a means for achieving business goals, and when you get it right in selecting and implementing the right technology, you also get it right by giving people in your environment the solutions they need. Our value, as part of the IT team, is our knowledge of the business and our ability to carry out consultancy work that provides value to the company. That’s the key. We should aspire to making people feel we can cooperate with them in improving their processes.
Q. For some time now, we’ve been living in internationally turbulent times. How do the geopolitical conflicts affect Grupo Arania’s roadmap on technology and innovation?
A. The conflicts and the constant increase in the use of technology are causing shortages and inflation. The investment in Data Centres for the evolution of AI is causing a very high demand for components and their subsequent price increases. For example, in 2026 memory prices have multiplied. We have to start from the basis that technology is the top economic industry in the world today. It’s no longer automotion, the property market, leisure, etc. The top economic factor in the world is technology. The richest companies on the planet are Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. Everyone is a technology consumer, and if a conflict causes logistics to come to a standstill that slows the distribution of chips, semiconductors or memory, this leads to a serious problem that directly affects a market that’s already under pressure.
Q. And in these turbulent times, how can technology help us? How?
A. It helps from the perspective of how cheap and instantaneous telecommunications are. The blackout that cut all telecommunications in Spain a year ago generated greater instability than the geopolitical conflicts. When the world stopped due to COVID people kept working from home and many businesses were able to keep going thanks to technology. Technology is a driving force for good times and bad, and technology is everything now. We have companies in America that use the same software services that we use here. Technology is a driving force that enables us to overcome logistics blockages or geopolitical circumstances that kill physical communications.
The group is able to retain talent thanks to a company culture that transmits care and proximity to people, and by providing motivating challenges.
Q. Staying at the forefront of technology requires talent. How do you manage to retain talent in a world that is also globalised in terms of work?
A. Firstly, by creating a company culture that transmits care and proximity to people. That’s the main key factor: plenty of people in IT could find work in other companies, but they stay here partly because they feel protected within the group. And if one day they have to care for a relative, for example, they know the group is going to facilitate that. One threat to talent retention is the remote work offered by other organisations, which that could be appealing, although none of our contracted professionals have left for this reason.
Q. Why is that?
A. It’s due to the protection I mentioned that the Group offers people and the fact it sees them as people, not just numbers. If you work responsibly, and your conduct is good, the group won’t leave you in the lurch and people value that. And of course, this is in addition to providing motivating challenges. The fact that at Grupo Arania we keep innovating and investing in improvements is a very attractive motivation for any good professional.
