Knoeppel was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin as son of John C. Knoeppel, a practical molder and foundryman, who had received some patents in 1878, 1881, and later on in 1909. The family moved to Buffalo, New York, where he attended school. Financially unable to continue college, he started to work. Knoeppel was journalist for a short while, before he started working his way up in an ironworks from laborer to draughtsman and designer to manager in 1904 at the age of 23. The next years he started working as consultant in factories apply the idea's scientific management. In 1909 he started working in the consultancy firm of Harrington Emerson, and in 1914 he founded his own consultancy firm in Philadelphia. named C. E. Knoeppel & Co., Inc. Knoeppel had adopted the ideal of efficiency, as developed by Harrington Emerson and others and developed the concept in far more details. Around 1905 Knoeppel had started writing a series of articles on efficiency methods, management, organization and administration, and graphic production control in the Engineering Magazine, and later a series of books, which were all published by the Engineering Magazine Company in New York. In 1933 Knoeppel authored the book Profit Engineering to which E. St. Elmo Lewis contributed the chapter "Securing Sales Called for by Profitgraph". Knoeppel died on 29 November 1936 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, just as his last book Managing for profit went on the press.
Work
''Maximum Production Through Organization and Supervision,'' 1908
Under the title "Maximum Production Through Organization and Supervision" Knoeppel published a series of four articles in the Engineering Magazine discussing the adjustment of organizations in the factory so that the utmost working efficiency may be secured. The editors introduced this article as follows:
''Principles of organization,'' 1908
In the first article of "Maximum Production Through Organization and Supervision" Knoeppel raised the subject of a universal application of the principles of organization: the segregation of authority. Furthermore Knoeppel illustrates the principle of segregation needed in the modern factory, by tracing the circumstances of a modern founder of business: James Bray Griffith in the Cyclopedia of Commerce, Accountancy, Business Administration argued, that "when we go into all of the ramifications of business we find many establishments where minor variations of our plan of organization appear necessary, but in the final analysis, the fundamentals prove to be the same." The working authorities in a manufacturing Business and in a trading Business follow a same scheme.
Industrial preparedness
Knoeppel was a disciple of Frederick Winslow Taylor, who promoted to concept of "industrial preparedness." He for example stated: According to Sheldon this is "a revelation not only of lack of accurate and immediate knowledge, but also of lack of that type of mentality which can map out a course for its activities and proceed methodically to follow that course." This could be solved by improving the so-called industrial preparedness.
