An approach to diagnosing suboptimal costs of energy sector enterprises

An energy sector is one of the pivotal industries of an economy. Access to electricity is a basic need for citizens, as well as for all spheres of economic activity and it is a necessity for the successful functioning of many types of enterprises. Companies, which are a part of a national energy infrastructure, have strategical importance at a governmental level.In this paper it was offered the definition of non-optimal/suboptimal costs for the companies of the Ukrainian energy sector. There were reviewed models for assessing the efficiency of the functioning of companies and their applicability for non-optimal costs identification, considering the Ukrainian energy sector context. Also, in was conducted an analysis of approaches to the financial diagnostics of enterprises. It was defined that high inflation does not allow full use of some of the approaches to find suboptimal costs. It is proved that without auxiliary analysis, none of the models considered corresponds to the business requirements and capable of identifying non-optimal costs of the companies in the energy sector of industry.An approach that combines various models for assessing the efficiency of an enterprise, financial analysis and modern means of collecting, processing and analyzing data to automate the process of searching for non-optimal costs at enterprises of the energy sector of Ukraine was proposed. The application of the proposed methodology will minimize labour losses for such a comprehensive analysis, automate the benchmarking process of the analyzed company and provide information to the company’s management, helping to identify areas of the company, where there are non-optimal costs are located and which can be optimized to improve the efficiency of the company.Dynamic reports about a company’s functioning and an assessment of the efficiency according to the proposed models will allow to initiate a project or program to optimize costs in a particular area of such a company. The effectiveness of this approach will largely depend on the effectiveness of the selected and implemented cost optimization program.The promising areas of further researches were identified, in particular - the prioritization of projects to optimize costs, identification of risks, associated with minimizing non-optimal costs, monitoring the implementation of projects and programs to optimize costs. The further direction of researches will be defined after the pilot implementation of the proposed methodology on one of the companies in the Ukrainian energy sector.