METHODICAL BASES OF ASSESSING THE POTENTIAL FOR INCREASING THE COMPETITIVENESS OF ENTERPRISES

For most enterprises the main purpose of their activities is to obtain proper financial results. For this reason, management of the enterprises requires a preliminary assessment of their economic potential. In particular, this concerns the potential to increase the competitiveness of enterprises. The assessment of the enterprise competitiveness potential is a prerequisite for determining the reserves of increasing its competitive advantages. The competitiveness is to a large extent affected by the management skills of business owners and managers. In particular, this refers to the ability to develop and implement a scientifically based strategy of competitive struggle and to manage the factors that shape the competitiveness. Nowaday much attention is paid to the assessing the competitiveness of both individual products and enterprises that produce them. It is worth to mention that the issue of managing the enterprise competitiveness is studied by many scientists. At the same time, the issue of managing the competitiveness of enterprises in modern scientific literature is more focused on the problem of better use of the real enterprise competitive potential rather than the question of this potential developing. The objective of the paper is to establish the essence and justification of assessment indicators of the enterprises competitiveness potential. This potential captures the ability of enterprises to provide a certain level of competitiveness in the future. Therefore, the following main tasks were consistently solved: the essence of the competitiveness potential were determined; the general approaches to its assessment were proposed; regularities of managing the factors of the enterprises competitiveness formation were determined. A twostage assessment of enterprise competitiveness potential is proposed. The first stage is the measurement of the existing level of competitiveness. At the second stage changes of the competitiveness indicators in the future are projected. Further research on the assessment of the competitiveness potential of enterprises requires the construction of formalized models of rotation of industry leaders as a result of technological changes.