Heavy-duty suspension and components manufacturer for commercial vehicles
Hendrickson designs and manufactures suspensions, leaf springs, bumpers, and stamped components for North American and global truck OEMs. The tech stack reveals a manufacturing operation grounded in CAD (SolidWorks, Creo, Unigraphics NX), simulation (ANSYS, MATLAB), and PLC controls (Siemens, Allen-Bradley), with active adoption of Allen-Bradley Logix 5000 and migration away from legacy iSeries systems. Hiring is manufacturing-heavy (168 roles) with a smaller engineering core (38 roles), matching a portfolio focused on production reliability, on-time delivery, and continuous improvement rather than software platform development.
Hendrickson is a privately held manufacturer headquartered in Woodridge, IL, with 1,001–5,000 employees and a 111-year track record in commercial vehicle suspensions. The company supplies every major North American heavy-duty truck and trailer OEM, plus manufacturers across Europe, Australia, Mexico, Japan, and Latin America. Product lines include tandem and liftable suspensions, air-ride systems, leaf springs, bumpers, tire inflation systems, wheel-ends, and aftermarket parts. Current operational focus centers on production reliability, inventory accuracy, equipment uptime, supplier quality management, and manufacturing process optimization, with active projects spanning 5S initiatives, new product development, tooling for safety and throughput, embedded vehicle sensing, and elastomer process improvement.
Primary design tools: SolidWorks, Creo, and Unigraphics NX for CAD; ANSYS and MATLAB for simulation. Manufacturing systems include QAD (ERP), Siemens and Allen-Bradley PLCs for controls, and Power BI for analytics.
Active projects include new product development, embedded vehicle sensing technology, tooling improvements for safety and throughput, root cause analysis of field systems, continuous improvement in elastomer manufacturing, and capital equipment projects. Primary operational challenges are production reliability, on-time delivery, and equipment uptime.
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