Pilotage des productions d'objets complexes dans l'industrie de l'Espace : innovation intensive et sériation

Companies arisen from the development of advanced technologies, in the aeronautics, the biomedical technologies or the computing, have to manage an extensive innovation and an optimal serial reproduction. The control of strategic processes, costs and deadlines, as well as an arsenal of standards and procedures, must face a high rhythm of innovation and technological challenges, with uncertainties and a severe compression of cycles and costs. The difficulties of piloting, coordination and the lack of robustness of the schedules, require to wonder about the strategic choices in organization, in instrumentation and in knowledges. Which approaches and which models seem relevant to organize and manage the conception and the production of such complex technical systems ? In association with a group of industrialists, in particular EADS, researches had been led a few years ago, under a round trip between empirical analysis and modeling. The research found an opportunity there to progress in the construction and the confrontation of new theoretical bases because the classic approaches had turned out fruitless. We tell the case of one of these companies specialized in the spatial activity (Cf 1.1). We expose the organizational and instrumental met problems (Cf 1.2 and 1.3). We present the models and the new concepts which clarified the reading of these problems and their emergence too, to finish by presenting the imagined and experimented solutions (cf 2.1 and 2.2). High regimes of innovation and of serial reproduction draw organizational forms with specialized networks and a centralized piloting. These regimes also demand a new design of the definition of objects. The theoretical headways and the accomplished industrial developments could benefit both the research in management and the very numerous companies confronted with the complexity of their systems, the piloting of a permanent innovation and at the same time a necessity of serial reproduction.