Charles Edward Knoeppel

Charles Edward(C.E.) Knoeppel (15 April 1881 – 29 November 1936) was an American organizational theorist and consultant, who was among the foremost writers on management techniques early 20th century.

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.

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:

...
Wikipedia