CISA Brand Guidelines: The Lucca Autoclave Maker in Fabio Perini’s Faper Group

A Tuscan steriliser maker inside an engineering group.

CISA is a maker of sterilisation and washing equipment based in Lucca, in Tuscany. The company says it was founded in 1947 and that it was one of the first companies in Italy to develop sterilisation autoclaves. Its manufacturing company is CISA Production S.r.l., of Lucca, and the group trades as Cisa Group. It is a separate business from CISA, the Italian lock maker of the same name.

The group’s website describes an international structure. Cisa Group, it says, forms a group together with Cisa America and Cisa Brasile, with two production sites, one in Italy and one in Brazil, a commercial office in the United States and about 140 distributors around the world. The Brazilian company is based at Joinville, in the state of Santa Catarina. An older company text, published as CISA’s partner page on the website of the World Federation for Hospital Sterilisation Sciences, describes Cisa s.r.l. as having produced and sold sterilisation systems for hospitals and industry for more than fifty years, working with university researchers.

CISA belongs to an engineering group from the same part of Tuscany. Its website says that Cisa Group is part of Faper Group, an Italian supplier of engineering solutions, and that the group takes its inspiration from its founder, Fabio Perini, the inventor and industrialist whose first business built machinery for converting tissue paper. Italian Wikipedia says Perini founded Faper Group in 2001, that it is based in Viareggio and that it now specialises in engineering for tissue paper, sterilisation systems and real estate. The same article quotes the citation for Perini’s 1991 appointment as a Cavaliere del Lavoro, an Italian order of merit for business, which lists hospital technologies, through Cisa, among the group’s activities.

In May 2023 the company announced that the board of CISA Production had appointed a new chief executive, on 22 May, and described the change as a step in a corporate reorganisation it was carrying out.

From the dirty side to the sterile side.

CISA works across three fields. In healthcare it designs, makes and supplies turnkey central sterile services departments, or CSSDs, for hospitals, together with washer-disinfectors and high-temperature steam sterilisers. For smaller users it offers the Cisa Compact series, which it aims at medical, veterinary and dental practices. In life science it makes washing and sterilisation equipment for laboratories, research centres and pharmaceutical companies, including sterilisers for biosafety levels I to IV.

The company’s own descriptions follow the layout of a hospital sterile-services department. Its washer-disinfectors, it says, sit between the dirty and clean areas and handle the automatic high-temperature washing of surgical instruments, reusable medical devices and anaesthesia accessories before they go to the autoclave. Its steam sterilisers sit in the clean area, with pass-through access to the sterile area, usually through pass-box windows. Its WFHSS partner page lists the sterilising methods it has covered over the years: ethylene oxide, hot air, superheated water, formaldehyde and mixtures of air and steam.

A third business applies steam sterilisation to hospital waste. CISA designs and installs what it calls WSD, or Waste Sterilization Department, plants, in sizes named WSD 100, 200 and 400, and smaller Sterili-Station units, the WSM50 and WSM70. In February 2023 the company reported that its British partner Peacocks Medical Group had won a Make UK National Energy & Sustainability award for work with Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust on Curo Waste, which CISA describes as its clinical waste solution.

Software is the newest part of the range. The company sells two tracking systems of its own: Tracecare, for following surgical kits through reprocessing in hospital sterile-services departments, and TraceWaste, for its waste-sterilisation plants. In December 2023 it announced that CISA Production had received a quality-management certificate under the European Medical Device Regulation 2017/745, a process it says it began in 2022.

Sterile services and their makers.

Sterilisation equipment is bought by hospital engineers, infection-control teams and the managers of sterile services departments — the rooms where used surgical instruments are washed, checked, packed and sterilised before they go back to the operating theatre. The makers describe their ranges in the order of that route. Getinge calls washer-disinfectors the first step in the reprocessing flow, then moves through sterilisers to the racks and trolleys that carry sterile goods back into the hospital.

The imagery of the category is practical rather than decorative: stainless-steel chambers, sliding or hinged chamber doors set into a wall, loading trolleys, wire baskets and instrument trays folded into blue sterilisation wrap. STERIS notes that its steam sterilisers are “often referred to as autoclaves” and sorts them by how many instrument trays fit in one load; Getinge groups its range into steam sterilisers, low-temperature sterilisers, loading equipment, and trays and baskets.

Many of the larger names grew by buying other companies, so their brands are layered. STERIS still sells steam sterilisers under the AMSCO name of the American Sterilizer Company, which it bought in 1996. Getinge folded Maquet, Atrium and other acquired names into a single Getinge brand in 2017, keeping some of them as product-family names. The makers in this set are based in the United States, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Germany, Italy, Israel and China.

The trade meets at a few large fairs. MEDICA, the medical-technology fair, is held in Düsseldorf. In Dubai, the show founded in 1975 as Arab Health now runs as World Health Expo Dubai, a new name announced at its 50th edition, TradeArabia reported; its 2026 edition moved to Expo City Dubai, Gulf News reported.

A hospital project in Lodi, on the public record.

CISA’s work can be followed in public procurement records. A contract award notice published in the European Union’s Official Journal on 31 March 2023 shows that the Lodi local health authority, ASST di Lodi, in Lombardy, awarded a contract for a new sterilisation centre in the basement of building F of its hospital in Lodi, replacing the existing one, to a group of firms that included CISA Production S.r.l. of Lucca; the contract was concluded on 27 February 2023. CISA described the same project in February 2023 as a new CSSD of almost 540 square metres serving the Lodi hospital and the hospital units of Codogno, Casalpusterlengo and Sant’Angelo Lodigiano, with about 800 beds in all.

The company’s words for itself are short English lines used on its Italian and English pages alike: “We care about life” for its healthcare work, and “Bridging Science and Life” for its laboratory and pharmaceutical work. Its website frames the group’s work around infection control in hospitals, laboratories and the pharmaceutical industry, and publishes essays such as a two-part tribute to the sterilisation chamber, written in 2023.

For a design guide, CISA shows how a regional engineering firm can present stainless autoclaves and hospital floor plans under a four-letter name and two English slogans. Compare Matachana and Belimed, two other European makers of sterilisation equipment. For this guide we use a deep navy, an autoclave steel and a terracotta with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep CISA’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.