c.ph.s, docent Moiseeva F.A., Kolotii V.A.

Donetsk national university of economics and trade

 

Sustainable Development as the Indicator of Enterprise Potential

 

Crisis-free functioning of the national economy is possible with the transition of all of its industries to sustainable development. In return, the sustainable development of the industry can be achieved only with the help of effective operation of primary parts of economic systems, i.e. enterprises.

It should be noted that in the existing unfavorable external conditions of enterprises operation, i.e. economic crisis, imperfection of legislative framework, rise of bank interests, tax screw and so on, improvement of enterprise management becomes more important. The lack of appropriate economic management mechanism and the instruments of influences on business units significantly slows down the economic development of the country.

Enterprise management is more often faced with complications during the choice of strategic directions of enterprise operation, taking into account all peculiarities of economic management and financial activities, which will allow the enterprises to adapt to fast-changing environment and to survive in difficult conditions.

The sustainable development of an enterprise is influenced by external as well as internal factors, affecting the enterprise operation.

The external factors include:

- industrial policy of a state;

- competition on the goods market;

- information environment;

- development of the production cooperation system;

- legal support of the business;

- investment and innovation climate;

- access to the resources;

- budgeting and financing support.

The internal factors include:

- finance indicators;

- equipment state;

- technology state;

- personnel potential;

- the level of management and technology organization;

- the level of innovation potential development.

This is the stability of enterprise operation, which consists in its ability to adapt to the changes of internal and external factors and to resist these changes, ensuring the enterprise stable development in accordance with the set goals.

The enterprise financial performance is of decisive importance for strategic sustainable development of the enterprise. For its assessment it is necessary to define the enterprise stability, i.e. the correlation between its production stock and owned circulating assets, including short-term banking credits, temporary available owned and other attracted funds. In this case the absolutely stable enterprises are those, whose production stock is less than the amount of the owned and attracted circulating assets.

For a more accurate assessment of the enterprise state it is necessary to trace the following indicators:

- autonomy factor;

- liquidity ratio;

- flexibility factor;

- circulating assets ensuring factor;

- funding ration;

- profitability factor.

The change of threshold values of the above-mentioned indicators leads to the violation of the normal operation of an enterprise and consequently to the negative results of industrial and economic activity. It should be noted that in order to ensure economically stable development the enterprises should develop their innovation potential and maintain it at the top level.

Essentially, the investing potential, first of all, is a characteristic of a resource base and the innovation potential shows how it is ready to perform the tasks, which ensure the achievement of the set goal for sustainable development in the changing conditions.

The enterprise innovation potential defines the opportunities and the depth of innovation transformations. In order to assess the innovation potential of an enterprise the following group of indicators can be used:

- indicators of the personnel, involved in innovation projects: the number and qualification of the specialists; the amount and quality of the specialists’ training;

- material and technical indicators: expenses on scientific and technical researches, research and development works, commercialization of innovations; progressiveness of production base;

- informative indicators: quantity and quality of the information collection, used in the innovation activities, of the possibility and quality of the information distribution, satisfaction of the specialists with the information;

- resulting indicators of innovation activities, which characterize their reasonability.

Low activity of enterprises in the implementation of innovation developments of external sources is the result of the poor development of the market infrastructure and the infrastructure of technologies exchange and it is also defined by the peculiarities of the national scientific and technological policy.

The absence of effective methods and forms of management by innovation resources requires the reformation of intercompany policy in the sphere of innovations, reassessment of the owned innovation potential and the systemic analysis of the external environment.

The transition to post-crisis development and effective operation of enterprises are possible if the main part of manufacturers and market consumers will timely form the resources of sustainable development as well as draw the appropriate programs of the development on the basis of self-control and economic feasibility.