AUTOMATED DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR ASSESSING AND IMPROVING THE COMPETITIVENESS OF FOOD INDUSTRY AND PUBLIC CATERING BUSINESS

Abstract

The publication presents the results of designing and testing an automated decision support system for assessing the competitiveness of catering and food industry enterprises, as well as generating solutions to improve it.

The relevance of the topic is determined by the insufficient presence of software products on the Russian market that allow assessing the competitiveness of enterprises. The purpose of this study was to develop the authors methodology for assessing the competitiveness of the food industry and public catering enterprises, as well as the automated tools implementing it. In addition, the developed automated decision support system allows analyzing the lowest values of individual indicators of enterprise competitiveness and generating solutions to improve them.

The software product at hand also allows you to calculate a generalized indicator for assessing the competitiveness of a food industry and catering enterprise.

The catering and food industry enterprises are subject to strict requirements in various regulatory documents of the Russian Federation and the Customs Union of the EAEU both at the stages of their design and operation, therefore, the developed methodology includes three groups of indicators used in assessing competitiveness: hard (mandatory) indicators, economic indicators, soft (additional) indicators.

The group of strict indicators is determined by the type of enterprise and the products produced. It is based on the corresponding SanPiN and the National State Standard, therefore it differs for bakery, dairy, meat processing and other industries and catering enterprises.
A set of evaluation indicators of a group of economic indicators used to assess competitiveness is formed from indicators reflecting the results of the economic activity of the entity corresponding to the form of ownership and the amount of income/ turnover of the enterprise in question.

Such a mechanism allows you to flexibly tune in to the object of competitiveness assessment because catering and food industry enterprises can be represented by individual entrepreneurs and small enterprises, and also by divisions of large international holdings that have significant differences in the methods of accounting for the results of economic activity.

The third group of indicators used in the author's methodology is also determined by the type of products produced by the enterprise, formed by experts from an extensive set of indicators, in most cases related to the company’s products or methods of interaction with consumers.

The structure of the automated decision support system includes a database, a knowledge base, a mechanism for forming conclusions when assessing the competitiveness of an enterprise and selecting management decisions for its improvement, an interface system that provides interaction in software products of various categories of users.

The automated decision support system interacts with users of the following categories: system administrator, knowledge engineer, experts, business managers, decision makers and assessors of the competitiveness of enterprises.

At different stages of the functioning of the automated decision support system for assessing and adjusting the competitiveness of catering and food industry enterprises, the consistency of expert opinions is assessed, both at the stage of selecting soft indicators for further work, and at the stage of evaluating them and calculating the generalized competitiveness coefficient, the concordance coefficient is the coefficient of consistency of expert opinions. To do this, the concordance coefficient is calculated, and the Pearson consensus criterion is used to assess its significance.