Engineering without frontiers

ACCIONA Engineering has been set up to concentrate and unify the Company's services offering. It consolidates the Group's position as a competitive player in the international market - for its size and reputation.

To talk of engineering in ACCIONA is talk of the origins of the Company. Not for nothing did the civil engineer José Entrecanales Ibarra found the construction company carrying his name. It has always been different from competitors, offering bold and novel technical solutions to solve problems and add advantage from the viewpoint of cost and time taken to do the job.

The reason ACCIONA Engineering has been set up is clear: to bring together all our engineering resources and capacities under one roof - and thus gain competitiveness in the market. ACCIONA Engineering has emerged from the merger of AEPO and Iberinsa, two civil engineering heavyweights. From its established position in Spain, the resulting Company is now better able to tackle its principal challenge: international growth.

The know-how behind the merger has opened the path to a new horizon of clients and countries that need to find solutions for infrastructure development. It is also helping closer tie-ups with the construction company. "At the international level, engineering is often the weapon which allows the construction company to bid for contracts, since it opens up opportunities upstream through consultancy work in order to offer the best ideas and technical solutions to the needs raised with us," explained Carlos López, Director General of ACCIONA Engineering.

This new business unit, can count upon some 650 professionals to bring their own experiences, technologies and methodologies to design projects from preliminary stages to turnkey delivery - in civil, industrial and environmental engineering. They are there to manage works and infrastructures, optimize and lead maintenance, and contribute studies, laboratory testing, R&D&I projects, operational plans, and solutions, as consultants.

Two companies, one purpose

Iberinsa was formed in 1960, an engineering and consulting company within the Entrecanales Group, with the name, Ibérica de Estudios e Inversiones, S.A. It changed its name to Ibérica de Estudios e Ingeniería in 1971. The Company was of fundamental support to the differentiation strategy of Entrecanales y Távora as a construction firm, which was indeed its main client, particularly in terms of absorbing technical services. Entrecanales y Távora thus became a company blessed with exceptional technical capacity, fruit of the engineering vocation and talent of José Entrecanales and his dedicated involvement with the Engineering School which permitted him to create a collective of outstanding and restless engineers, many of whom worked or collaborated with his company. As of 1982, Iberinsa's activity gradually extended to other public and private sector clients and in the second half of the 1990s it decidedly committed to expanding internationally.

Consultancy work opens doors by offering ideas and technical solutions for clients' needs

AEPO stands for Agrupación para Estudios y Proyectos de Obras. It was originally a work team, formed in 1953, by a group of private companies that brought together qualified technical experts and whose function was to support them in the technical preparation of the services they could offer individually or together above all in the international market. The founding companies were Cubiertas y Tejados, MZOV, Obrascón, Sociedad Constructora Ferroviaria, Inmobiliaria Velázquez and Compañía Internacional de Construcciones. In 1964, by then a limited liability company (Sociedad Anónima, S.A.), AEPO became independent and the property of the professionals of whom it consisted. Its activity, although continuing to be linked to the founding companies, opened up to other companies and particularly public administrations, which by then were beginning to outsource project design and works supervision. Thus AEPO became a benchmark for its clients as they developed their infrastructure plans.

In-house role

ACCIONA Infrastructure keeps its Engineering Services Unit, with a team of 60 professionals led by Rafael Castillo. "Our mission is to improve our product, adding value at different stages, from bidding for contracts to commissioning, while resolving problems which can occur on the way," he pointed out.

Conceived as an internal technical consultancy, ACCIONA Engineering's ability to find the best solution for performance, quality and feasibility, is the key to its competitiveness.