Nadia MarinChief Information Officer · Essays & perspective
Store systems replacement5 min read
Keeping the grocery store able to trade
Retail technology programmes are usually planned forward from a vendor's end-of-support date. In grocery they should be planned backwards from the trading year and from every device on the shop floor, and the vendor's date should be bought out when the two collide.
Every large retailer eventually receives the same letter. A software supplier announces that a product the business depends on will leave support on a given date, offers a successor and proposes a migration plan that finishes comfortably before the deadline. The plan is usually sensible from the supplier's side of the table: its engineers are free in the right months, and moving every customer at once suits its own economics. What the plan rarely contains is the shape of the retailer's year.
Machine-learning forecasts now place a growing share of fresh-food orders in European supermarkets. They should be judged on waste and late-day availability rather than headline accuracy, and they should order on their own only where they can show how uncertain they are.
Boards usually ask how likely a payments, network or cyber outage is. The more useful question is how long each store can keep selling with nothing behind it, and whether someone owns the answer as carefully as they own a new system.
Ravessa net sales, 2025
€4.32bn
618 supermarkets in seven Spanish regions; fresh food 38 per cent of sales
Checkouts moved to a new till platform
5,240
Nine regional waves, January 2023 to November 2024, with no store losing a trading day
Card payments completed during the September 2025 processor outage
97%
After a second acquirer and limited offline acceptance were introduced
In grocery, the system that counts is the one a store can still sell on when everything behind it has failed.
I am the chief information officer of Ravessa Supermercados, a fictional Zaragoza-based grocery chain listed on the Spanish stock exchanges. We sold €4.32 billion of food and household goods in 2025 through 618 supermarkets in seven Spanish regions, supplied by four distribution centres and a fresh-food platform. More than a third of what we sell is fresh, so a technology failure in our business soon becomes a gap on a shelf, a queue at a checkout or a crate of hake that nobody ordered.
I came to this work from the shop floor. I began in 1998 writing till software in Brașov, then spent ten years with an Austrian grocery group as it opened stores across central and eastern Europe, converting tills for a Romanian currency redenomination and a Slovak euro changeover. I moved to Madrid in 2012 to run IT for a drugstore chain, joined Ravessa in 2017 and became CIO in January 2021.
Three events shaped how I work. A merchandising cutover I led in January 2015 emptied shelves for nine days because I accepted a date that suited the project rather than the shops. A ransomware attack on one of our distribution centres in February 2023 made me choose, at four in the morning, between protecting the network and keeping lorries moving. A card outage on the Saturday before Christmas 2023 showed how little a supermarket can sell when one outside service stops. I now plan every system around how a store trades once it is gone.
Every till replaced without a store losing a day
Between January 2023 and November 2024 we moved 5,240 checkouts in 612 stores to a new till platform in nine regional waves, and no store lost the ability to trade. I paid €3.8 million for a year of extended support on the old software to stay clear of Christmas.
A distribution centre recovered without paying a ransom
When ransomware encrypted the warehouse systems at our Guadalajara centre in February 2023, I isolated all four distribution centres for 19 hours. The attack did not spread, the system was restored from protected backups in 82 hours and no ransom was paid.
Card payments that survive an outage
After a 165-minute processor outage in December 2023, we added a second acquirer and limited offline acceptance. When our main processor failed again in September 2025, 97 per cent of card payments still went through.
Fresh waste reduced with the model's limits stated
Machine-learning forecasts now order most packaged fresh lines, while counter categories stay with store managers. Fresh shrink fell from 4.6 to 3.9 per cent of fresh sales, about €11 million a year, against a vendor case of 3.2 per cent. The board sees both numbers.
Current focus
I am preparing the board's decision on replacing our merchandising and finance system between 2027 and 2029, a programme of about €38 million that I will plan backwards from the trading calendar, as we did the tills. I am also extending shipping and temperature data to our remaining fresh suppliers.
Conversations I welcome
I am not seeking to leave Ravessa. With the consent of our chief executive and board, I would consider one independent non-executive seat at a consumer, food or distribution company outside grocery retail, joining its audit or risk committee. I can give about twenty-four days a year, and I accept a few invitations to speak to retail and audit-committee audiences.
Beyond the page
The record behind the perspective.
In the boardroom
Ravessa Online, S.L.U.Director of the wholly owned online grocery subsidiary, in an executive capacity · 2021–present
Fundación Mesa Común AragónTrustee of a regional food-redistribution charity, unpaid · 2022–present
Formation
Diploma in computer engineeringInstitutul Politehnic Țara Bârsei · 1998
Executive master's degree in supply chain managementEscuela de Negocios Albarda · 2015
Programme for prospective non-executive directorsInstituto Arbeyal de Gobierno Corporativo · 2025
Nadia brings the committee the risk we have not asked about, with a number attached and the uncomfortable part first. After the Guadalajara attack her paper told us what she had got wrong before it told us what she had got right. That is rarer in an executive than it should be.
Mercedes Arnedo VilaplanaFictional independent director and chair of the Audit and Control Committee, Ravessa Supermercados, S.A.The full record ↗
Contact
I am not seeking to leave Ravessa. With the consent of our chief executive and board, I would consider one independent non-executive seat at a consumer, food or distribution company outside grocery retail, joining its audit or risk committee. I can give about twenty-four days a year, and I accept a few invitations to speak to retail and audit-committee audiences.