Missouri S&T lecturer Kellie Grasman, center, won the 2015 Joint Publishers Book of the Year Award for a textbook she co-authored with, from left, David Pratt, Kim LaScola Needy, Kenneth Case and John A. White.

Kellie Grasman, lecturer in engineering management and systems engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology, won the Joint Publishers Book of the Year Award at the 2015 Industrial and Systems Engineering Research Conference for a textbook she co-authored titled “Fundamentals of Engineering Economic Analysis.”

Grasman shared the award with her coauthors: Dr. John A. White, chancellor emeritus of the University of Arkansas; Dr. Kim LaScola Needy, head of the department of industrial engineering at Arkansas; and Dr. Kenneth Case and Dr. David Pratt, professors of industrial engineering and management at Oklahoma State University.

“The fundamental topic or concept is the time value of money,” says Grasman, who served as coauthor on the print text and primary author of the online component, WileyPLUS. “We try to teach that it’s more valuable to have $100 today — because of its potential to earn interest — than it is to wait a year to have that money. So the book presents the economic basics an engineer would need.”

The book features learning objectives, key terms, real-world stories with discussion questions, enhanced summary sections and over 800 end-of-chapter problems. WileyPLUS provides video lessons, video solutions, algorithmic problems and tutorials. Engineering economics problems from corporations such as Walmart, J.B. Hunt Transport Services Inc., ConocoPhillips and Intel help prepare students for the types of issues they might face in their future engineering careers.

It looks beyond the technical side of things to present the big picture, Grasman says.

“It’s one of the few topics that most engineers get that have a business slant to it,” she says. “The content applies to engineers practicing in their profession — or anyone in financial dealings. No matter how exciting a project is, if you can’t justify it financially, it’s not going to get off the ground.”

From start to finish, it took Grasman and the team about a year and a half to finish the book, which is used in engineering management and systems engineering classes at Missouri S&T. The expectation is, Grasman says, that new editions will appear every few years.

“I was really privileged to be asked to work on the book,” Grasman says

Grasman earned an MBA from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor’s Ross School of Business in 1999. She also earned a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering in 1997; a master of engineering degree in manufacturing in 1998; and a master of science degree in industrial and operations engineering in 1999, all from the University of Michigan.