By Paula Rosenblum, Managing Partner

Steve Beck passed away on December 30, 2011. In many ways, the retail world will not quite be the same without him. He was a character the likes of which we may never see again. In the mid-80’s he had the cheek to take something as mammoth as Merchandise Planning and put it on a PC (which back then had some limitations like 640k of real memory, 40 mb disk drives and no built-in GUI – all DOS all the time).

When Steve came to our Canton, Massachusetts offices at Morse Shoe (owner of the late Fayva Shoe chain) and announced that British Shoe was live on his new planning system Arthur, we sat up and took notice. He made a good presentation to our board and we ended up buying the thing. I was too young to be nervous, so I went ahead and took the project on from the IT side. It was an adventure.

Tom Redd, now at SAP and an original Arthur marketing guy, is fond of saying we were the first company to make it through the “explode” – the point where total store plans are smashed against total department plans to create a department plan by store. It took a bunch of English programmers, the biggest PC’s we could find and a lot of prayers to make that happen. Frank Zarrello also claims the title, and who am I to say differently? In any case, we both “climbed the Arthur mountain” (as my friend Judy Newdom described it), and got the thing running. Those of you using JDA planning today might want to honor Steve’s vision. It was, in its day, completely revolutionary.

Steve’s adventures sure didn’t end with Arthur. Just a quick look at his LinkedIn profile pretty much says it all. I confess I didn’t realize just how many more innovations he brought forward.