Cinema 4D's standard material is great for many surfaces, but for those surfaces which require special treatment, there are specialized shaders such as Danel for high gloss surfaces, and Cheen for an electron microscope look.
Suppose you've used a shader like Noise in the Color material channel and you want to use exactly the same noise settings in the Bump channel so that the two channels match up. There's no need to redo all the settings again in the bump channel - simply use copy channel and paste channel.