Defining “Modernization”

Modernization is, to pardon the pun, a somewhat old phrase. Derived from French in about 1770, there really is nothing new about it! In your professional experience, you might be thinking you’ve been modernizing for your entire career. But in the context of modern logistics and DC processes, it refers to a specific “trend,” if you will, of not just updating specific systems with new equipment and software, but a more significant step of evolving from a set of legacy technologies to an entirely new type of system.

In 1945, Léon Theremin invented a listening device for the Soviet Union which retransmitted incident radio waves with the added audio information. Sound waves vibrated a diaphragm which slightly altered the shape of the resonator, which modulated the reflected radio frequency. Even though this device was a covert listening device, rather than an identification tag, it is considered to be a predecessor of RFID because it was passive, being energized and activated by waves from an outside source.