National Highways Lean Maturity Assessment - HELMA 2024
The National Highways Lean team, working alongside many members of supply chain, has launched an improved and refreshed version of HELMA, called HELMA 2024.
HELMA assessment tool
The aim of the HELMA assessment tool is to help organisations to determine the extent to which they have adopted Lean principles, to help foster a culture of continuous improvement for mutual advantage.
The assessment process highlights areas for improvement and uses this information to help drive Lean deployment.
National Highways has been measuring supply chain maturity since 2011.
Lean aims
Providing customer value with:
- lower costs
- better quality
- faster delivery
Guiding principles
Eliminating non-value-adding processes by empowering employees to find ways of doing more with less
Lean tools
Value stream mapping, 5S, visual management, work standardisation, just-in-time production, single piece flow, continuous improvement, improvement events, mistake proofing, root cause analysis, total quality management, total productive maintenance, statistical process control, Lean six sigma, etc
There are five levels of achievement in HELMA assessment:
| Level 0 | Not started yet |
| Level 1 | Started to show some initial progress in some areas |
| Level 2 | Developing and delivering good practice in specific areas |
| Level 3 | Good practice and performance improvement in many areas |
| Level 4 | Excellent organisation-wide achievement embedded |
After each moderation an Improvement Action Plan is produced by the organisation/project being assessed.
Scores for HELMAs which have been moderated by National Highways are published at the end of the financial year.
HELMA 2024 scores (last updated 12 March 2025)
The assessment framework
There are 10 topic areas within the HELMA assessment framework:
- Integration of Lean and business strategy
- Lean leadership and engagement
- Deployment management and Lean infrastructure
- Voice of the customer
- Value streams and processes
- Methodologies and tools
- Competencies and capabilities across the organisation
- Performance improvement and delivery of outcomes
- Continuous improvement culture
- Supplier engagement
We've launched an improved and refreshed version of HELMA, called HELMA 2024.
