Cerris Systems

Cerris Systems traces to 1932, when three brothers started Midwest Plumbing & Heating in Kansas City. It is now the mechanical, electrical and plumbing contracting arm of Cerris, the employee-owned holding company formerly known as MMC Corp, and runs 18 offices from Nevada to Florida out of a corporate base in Overland Park, Kansas. The firm self-performs mechanical, electrical and plumbing work along with preconstruction and building automation, and its largest single operation sits in south Kansas City. Data centers and mission-critical work now sit alongside its longer-standing healthcare, education, hospitality and industrial books, and the firm’s VDC group has been publicly vocal about client schedule pressure in the data center market. Cerris has been 100% employee-owned since 2002 and has grown by acquisition, adding Building Control Services and Stroh Corporation in 2016, the Electric Company of Omaha in 2024 and Allen’s Mechanical in 2026.

The office map is the useful part of this listing, because a national MEP contractor is only national where it has crews. Cerris publishes eleven locations with addresses and direct phone numbers: Kansas City on Wyandotte Street and Springfield in Missouri; Omaha and Lincoln in Nebraska; Des Moines in Iowa; Bentonville in Arkansas; Gallatin, outside Nashville, in Tennessee; Huntsville in Alabama; Las Vegas and Reno in Nevada; and Mesa, outside Phoenix, in Arizona.

Capabilities are grouped as building automation, construction, preconstruction, prefabrication and service, with prefabrication and preconstruction called out as separate offerings rather than bundled into construction. The company positions itself as able to partner from design through building maintenance, which is the argument for keeping preconstruction and long-term service under one roof.

Market coverage is broad: power and energy, hospitality and entertainment, federal government and public works, office building and retail, healthcare, industrial, education, pharmaceutical and mission critical. Named projects span the Arthur M. Blank Patient Tower at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, the Southeast Career Technical Academy, FM Bank Arena, the Sobela Ocean Aquarium at Kansas City Zoo and the Kiewit Luminarium.

The corporate timeline shows a business rebuilt several times. Midwest Plumbing & Heating was founded by Claude Sanders in Kansas City in 1932. It became Midwest Mechanical Contractors in 1960, opened a New Jersey office in 1984 and a Nebraska office in 1996, and the MMC Corp structure appeared in 1990. Pahor Air Conditioning was acquired in 2000; BCS opened in 2002, the same year the company became fully employee-owned. Midwest Mechanical Services followed in 2007, all mechanical brands consolidated under MMC Contractors in 2010, and C&H Mechanical and R&D Cryo Solutions were acquired in 2011. Stroh Corporation in Des Moines and BCS were both acquired in 2016, adding electrical and building automation. New Jersey closed in 2019; Lincoln opened in 2021, Bentonville in 2023, Huntsville in 2024. The rebrand to Cerris Systems came in 2024, after the company marked 90 years in 2022.

A 24-hour service line is published for each region, separate from the construction side.