The current business environment is volatile and complex. Companies must constantly identify creative and environmentally friendly solutions. The emphasis on employees and workforce agility has become an attribute of sustainable and competitive organizations simultaneously. The purpose of our study is to validate the hypothesis that there is a direct positive relationship between ranking as important top position of human resources in a company and the extent to which specific practices to increase workforce agility were adopted. Our survey is based on an original questionnaire, with a 92% response rate. We focused on large, independent decision-making companies from Western Romania, for which the implementation of sustainable principles is more difficult than for multinationals. The statistical analysis was performed using SPSS23 (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences). The results indicate an average extent of the adoption of management practices aiming to increase workforce agility (45%) and a ranking of human resources in first place as the most important resource (31.7%). Using the Pearson Chi-Square Test, the hypothesis was confirmed (significance = 0.026). Our main conclusion is that if managers intend to develop a sustainable and competitive business, they should attribute a strategic role to employees and adopt practices to increase their agility.

This paper aims to bring to the forefront a concept that has put its mark on the manufacturing process development over the past two decades, namely lean manufacturing. The objective of the theoretical part of the article is, by summarizing the information existing in the literature, to present the meanings given to the concept of lean manufacturing and how it can be implemented in organizations (steps to be followed, success factors, barriers), the term evolution and the emergence of a new concept - Lean Six Sigma. The second part is an investigative approach to the interest of Romanian bloggers in studying the lean manufacturing phenomenon, especially a well-known instrument of it, just-in-time production method. The information obtained has shown that although the concept is an intensely studied international literature, in the autochthonous approach is in the early stages.