A lights-out lab in Pune is selling the autonomous plant as a service

Tata Consultancy Services has opened what it calls India’s first lights-out factory lab, at Sahyadri Park in Pune. The centrepiece is a fully robotic battery-pack assembly line. The pitch is not that customers should switch the lights off tomorrow. It is that they can try predictive maintenance, automated inspection, and closed-loop process control on a real cell without taking production hostage.

“Lights-out” is a marketing term with a precise operational meaning: autonomous systems running with minimal human intervention. Most factories that use the phrase still have a lot of people, standing in a lot of light. The useful product here is a rehearsal space. Manufacturing software has always lacked a staging environment. TCS is building one, and charging for it.