METHODOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES OF SMARTIZATION: DETERMINATION OF PRIORITY DIRECTIONS

Innovation has always been the driving force of progress. Innovations allow the enterprise to apply the strategy of removing the cream, leaving behind competitors, improving its activities and, sometimes, the well-being of countries and the world as a whole. However, innovations have two disadvantages: a) high cost; b) a tiny part of them achieves commercial success. If you pay attention to the statistics, a small number of industrial enterprises are innovatively active: from 16 to 19% in recent years. At the same time, it should be noted that Ukrainian enterprises have so far failed to attract foreign investments to finance innovative activities. Every year, the results of innovative activity — the introduction into production of innovative types of products, names and specific weight of implemented innovative products — decrease. At the same time, the particular weight of enterprises that introduced innovations is unchanged: approximately 10–15% in the corridor. In recent years, the meaning has even come out of the hallway. This means that for 17 years, enterprises have continued to engage in innovations at almost the same level. Still, their vector has changed — towards introducing new technological processes, namely low-waste, resource-saving ones. The reality of Ukrainian industrial enterprises is that most of them are at the stage of maturity or decline, that is, at the stages when innovations require significant funds for their introduction. The smartization of the enterprise is an alternative to innovation. The process of smartization carried out at the enterprise is not isolated, and it acts as an integral part of the complex system of transformation of the enterprise. Ignoring the changes leads to missed benefits or direct losses in implementing smartization works. Smartization, in its essence, is close to reengineering: they are identical in terms of goals but differ in methods. Reengineering is a radical change of business processes to obtain rapid growth of the leading indicators of the enterprise's economic activity. Work on smartization does not start from the bottom (at the level of document flow and execution of single operations of the business process) but from above—at the macro level, when the enterprise is considered an operation in the supply chain of additional values. This allows us to identify and realize the principal reserves of the enterprise since, as a rule, more than 50% of the reserves for cost reduction and quality improvement lie outside the enterprise.