Limestone's Recipe for Success

Milliken’s Limestone facility in Gaffney, South Carolina, was recently certified in the state’s OSHA Voluntary Protection Program (VPP)—a certification that’s not mandatory, not easy to get, but absolutely worth the effort to achieve. As the first Milliken-acquired site to receive this honor and the fourteenth overall Milliken site to be SC Star certified, the Limestone team’s accomplishment embodies key elements of the recipe for success that guides Milliken’s operations worldwide.

In OSHA, VPP stands for Voluntary Protection Program. Yet that same acronym highlights several critical ingredients in Milliken’s recipe for success in safety. In this context, VPP stands for Values, Partnership, and Performance. A strong safety culture requires many ingredients – including programs, policies, procedures, permits, and PPE. But at its core, safety is about people. At Milliken, People are one of our five core values. They are part of who we are as a fifth-generation, family-owned company that’s been around for 165 years. We know the meaning of valuing people—like the great men and women at Limestone who commit each day to safely making excellent textile products that customers have come to expect from Milliken. This core value of protecting our people helps drive achievements like Limestone’s VPP certification. While there are a lot of achievements in safety, there is no final destination. Instead, safety is a journey, and at Milliken our safety journey is marked by a relentless pursuit of Excellence – another one of our core values. Excellence at Milliken is marked by a spirit of continuous improvement – and it is this spirit that propelled Limestone to their VPP certification.

These two core values of People and Excellence guide our way forward; however, the recipe for success in safety also requires partnerships. The most critical internal partnership is the one between leadership and associates. This is a hallmark of Milliken’s safety culture and is based on the principles of engagement and empowerment. This partnership is most clearly characterized by Limestone’s several safety subcommittees that are staffed, led, and directed by our associates. The plant’s workforce is empowered to drive safety programs, an element of our culture that fully embodies the core VPP principle of employee participation.

External partnerships also play an important role in our recipe for success. For example, our partnership with South Carolina OSHA has for decades allowed Milliken to take advantage of the expertise and experience of the OSHA team, making our programs better and our workplaces safer. In a nod to the size and value of this partnership, currently Milliken’s 14 SC OSHA VPP Star certified sites make up more than 40% of the 33 total VPP-certified sites in the state. This collaboration with South Carolina OSHA has been instrumental in achieving VPP certification for so many of our sites.

But values and partnership alone are not a strong enough recipe for success. At the end of the day, success must involve stronger performance, which in the case of safety implies fewer injuries. In 2024, Milliken’s commitment to our core values of People and Excellence and our strong internal and external partnerships propelled us to our best safety performance in more than a decade. Using a broader lens, when comparing data on our VPP partnership in South Carolina, Star-certified sites like Limestone have injury rates that are 65% lower than the state industry average. It’s clear the recipe is delivering strong performance.

At a Milliken Textile site like Limestone, we know a thing or two about weaving, fabric, and excellence. So, it’s no surprise that safety excellence is woven daily into the fabric of our company culture. The Limestone team’s dedication, hard work, and recent VPP Star certification are a testament to what can be achieved when values, partnership, and performance come together – a recipe for safety success.

Michael Brown is Milliken’s EVP of Global Operations. He leads Milliken’s Global Operations function including corporate logistics, transportation, sourcing, environmental health and safety (EH+S), corporate engineering, security, the Milliken Performance Solutions office, and Milliken’s consulting arm, Performance Solutions by Milliken.