Nowadays, there is a growing need to consider crisis management in organizations due to an increased occurrence of crises in our society. Manufacturing organizations are often affected by crises due to their supply chain reliance and many small-medium sized enterprises (SMEs) do not have the resources to work with crisis management. There is an identified lack of research regarding how manufacturing SMEs work with crisis management and how the particularities of the manufacturing industry and the specific characteristics and reliance of resources of SMEs can affect crisis management. The purpose of this thesis is to increase the understanding of strategic crisis management in manufacturing SMEs. The thesis outlines different strategic crisis management models which includes the crisis processes of detection, occurrence, and recovery. To understand the practices of manufacturing SMEs, a qualitative study was conducted through 8 eight semi-structured interviews with respondents from Sweden and Switzerland. The thesis discuss the findings of the crisis management carried out by the manufacturing SMEs and existing crisis management models for SMEs and Chinese large- and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises (CLMMEs). The paper concludes that manufacturing SMEs are affected economically by the Covid-19 pandemic crisis. The most common impacts include a decrease in orders and delivery delays. Furthermore, the research provides a contribution to the understanding of how manufacturing SMEs deal and work with crises. The most identified practices were market diversification, active communication with stakeholders, cost reduction and crisis recap.Findings also showed that manufacturing SMEs worked with pre-event planning as an essential part of their crisis management. The paper further proposes a strategic crisis management model for manufacturing SMEs.

Les crises projettent la plupart du temps le décideur sur une durée plus ou moins longue dans l’urgence de la décision, avec l’obligation de minimiser les conséquences possibles sur les enjeux. Une équipe de gestion de crise est organisée en cellule et a pour objectif de construire des stratégies de réponse concertées et appropriées. Or, il s’avère que certaines des compétences nécessaires ne peuvent être acquises que par expérience. Ce travail s’attache ainsi à améliorer les processus de formation des décisionnaires en définissant, suivant quatre étapes, un environnement semi-virtuel de formation à la gestion stratégique de crise. Une phase de conception sert tout d’abord de point de départ au cahier des charges d’une implantation physique, d’une ingénierie système et d’une ingénierie pédagogique dédiées. Puis, une étape de modélisation d’un exercice de gestion de crise structure une méthodologie visant à définir les objectifs pédagogiques retenus, et propose une méthode appliquée de génération semi-automatique d’un scénario didactique. Une attention particulière est notamment portée sur l’élaboration d’une typologie d’évènements et d’éléments logiciels permettant la simulation multi-agents de crises virtualisées. Enfin, une méthodologie d’évaluation des participants est proposée dans le but d’enrichir la phase classique de débriefing. Seize indicateurs sont définis et permettent en particulier de construire des arbres de compétences. Une phase de validation porte sur trois de ces quatre axes méthodologiques, et il est montré que les premiers résultats obtenus tendent à valider les spécifications retenues pour l’environnement semi-virtuel de formation développé. / Currently, actors who deal with crisis situations have to make decision under stress and to act in emergency for mitigating the consequences or avoiding the impacts on critical stakes. To achieve this common goal efficiently, these actors must constitute a crisis cell and collaborate in a coordinated way. But crisis management requires skills which depend mainly on experience. That is why, this work aims to propose a set of methods in order to characterize training decision makers. In order to develop a semi-virtual training environment for strategic crisis management, four axes are studied. The first one focuses on a design pattern – based on chronological, systemic and functional analyzes – and leads to the specification of a real generic training platform. The second one defines a methodology for the semi-automatic generation of dynamic crisis scenarios (models, databases, etc.). The third one deals with a simulation model (based on a multi-agent system), and especially a dedicated typology for required events: the phenomena (reactive agents), the operational and tactical actors (archetypical agents), and the pedagogical events (action of trainers). The last one contributes to facilitate the exercises animation and the debriefings management, thanks to three methods of participant assessment. Sixteen indicators are defined and used, in particular, to build capability trees. Finally, three of these four topics have been validated and the first results seem to fit with the aim of the semi-virtual training environment developed.