Henneman Engineering, Inc.

Henneman Engineering, Inc. is a mechanical, electrical, plumbing and structural engineering firm headquartered at 1605 South State Street in Champaign, Illinois, with additional offices in Waukesha, Wisconsin and Naples, Florida. The practice traces to 1961 and took its present name in 2005. Alongside core MEP design it offers building commissioning, construction administration, BIM, energy and geothermal work, cogeneration design and an information technology systems group. Henneman is ISO 9001 certified and is a certified Women’s Business Enterprise through WBENC, the State of Illinois Business Enterprise Program and the Wisconsin Department of Administration. The firm is the MEP engineer on the Illinois State Capitol north wing renovation in Springfield and previously worked on the restoration of the Illinois Executive Mansion.

Henneman’s Industrial Technology Group is the part of the firm that does not look like building engineering at all. Formed in 1997 as a deliberate growth strategy, ITG handles industrial work – power generation plants, ethanol and biodiesel facilities – for clients including Caterpillar and Kraft Heinz, and it carries its own mechanical, electrical-power, electrical-controls and structural service lines rather than borrowing from the building side.

The corporate history is a chain of mergers rather than a straight line, and it starts earlier than the company name suggests. Engineering runs in the Henneman family back to electrical work and construction in Chicago in the 1910s. Ralph Henneman founded the predecessor firm Henneman Carroll in Urbana in 1961 with partner Raymond Carroll. The business became Ralph Henneman & Associates in 1976, then Henneman, Raufeisen and Associates in 1982 when Al Raufeisen joined ownership. Henneman purchased and merged with S & R Engineering of Urbana in 1995, acquired Jaspal Engineering Services of Madison, Wisconsin in 2000, and adopted the present name in 2005 to reflect a multi-disciplined practice. The firm now describes itself as building on 65 years of success, with projects ranging from engineering studies to $200 million facilities.

At the Illinois State Capitol, Henneman was selected to lead the entire design team for the historic preservation and restoration of the west wing, including the preservation architects Vinci-Hamp. The site notes it as the first state capitol to be awarded LEED Gold certification. Other recent work includes a 70,000 square foot LEED Silver police station for the Village of Oswego, Illinois and Tomah Memorial Hospital in Tomah, Wisconsin. The institutional footing goes back decades: one of the firm’s first healthcare commissions was Methodist Medical Center in Peoria in the early 1970s, an early out-of-state job was a Ballistic Missile System project for the Army Corps of Engineers in San Bernardino, California, and it has completed a long run of University of Illinois projects, among them the Henry Administration Building.

Champaign holds two Henneman offices, not one: the headquarters at 1605 South State Street and a second at 2803 Research Road, on 217-398-6280. Each office runs autonomously inside the corporate structure while sharing a network, video conferencing and access to the expertise of every other branch. Leadership shifted over the past decade and the firm is now majority women owned and controlled, which is the basis of its WBE certifications with the State of Illinois Business Enterprise Program and the Wisconsin Department of Administration.