The main aspects of choosing the enterprises' operating strategy

Retail trade occupies an important place in the economy of Ukraine, ensuring the sale of manufactured goods to end consumers. For retailers, it is important to achieve timeliness and reliability of services to meet customer needs, which can be achieved through the formation of operational strategy. The purpose of the article is to form a methodological approach to the development of operational strategy of retail enterprises, which is based on the requirements of corporate strategy, selected in accordance with the stage of the life cycle of the industry. The development of this methodological approach was carried out on the basis of  Hill's model and system approach. As a result, a logical scheme of the process of developing an operational strategy is presented, which is specified by the list of input and output information. In order to determine the stage of the life cycle of the market of retail services in Ukraine, the eponymous concept of Porter was applied and the analysis was carried out according to the criteria: consumers and their behaviour, sales costs, changes in services, the nature of competition, profitability and found that the retail services market is growing. The method of observation, comparative and analytical method was used for the analysis, the Herfindahl-Hirschman index (HHI) was calculated on the basis of the data of the largest retail trade enterprises of Ukraine. As a result, it was found that the market of retail services in Ukraine is growing. With this in mind, an operational strategy for Ukrainian retailers has been proposed, which should aim to ensure the flexibility and variability of the operating system. The defined general direction of the operational strategy will allow to establish the content of decisions on the choice of operational processes, as well as the infrastructure to support them.