The increasing complexity of current telecommunication satellite payloads has made their manual management a difficult and error prone task. As a consequence, efficient optimisation techniques are re- quired to help engineers to configure the payload. Recent works focusing on exact approaches faced scalability issues while metaheuristics provided unsatisfactory solution quality. This work therefore proposes three hybridisation schemes that combine both metaheuristics and an exact method. We focus on the initial configuration problem case and we consider as objective to minimise the length of the longest channel path. Experimental results on realistic payload sizes demonstrate the advantage of those approaches in terms of efficiency within a strict operational time constraint of ten minutes on a single CPU core.