Case Study: Simpson Associates

Client Overview

Simpson Associates is a UK-based data transformation and managed services provider headquartered in York, England.

Founded in 1991, the company helps organizations across both public and private sectors transform complex data into actionable insights. Simpson Associates is also a preferred technology partner for several UK government organizations.

To support organizations handling sensitive documents, Simpson Associates developed RedactXpert, a secure document redaction and information governance platform designed for sectors such as law enforcement, government, and legal services.

The platform enables organizations to automatically and manually redact sensitive information from documents such as PDF, DOCX, and PPTX, ensuring compliance with data protection regulations while enabling efficient document review and collaboration.

Business Challenge

Organizations working with sensitive documents particularly in public sector, legal, and law enforcement environments face several operational challenges when preparing documents for sharing or publication.

These challenges include:

• identifying personal identifiable information (PII) across large volumes of documents
• securely redacting confidential or sensitive information
• maintaining traceable audit logs of document edits
• supporting collaboration between multiple reviewers within a controlled workflow
• ensuring compliance with data protection regulations such as GDPR

Manual redaction processes are often slow, error-prone, and difficult to manage at scale. Simpson Associates therefore needed to enhance its RedactXpert platform to provide a more efficient and secure document redaction workflow.

NSC Solution

NSC supported the project by providing a dedicated QA team responsible for validating the platform’s functionality, security, and reliability across its document processing and redaction workflows.

The team focused on ensuring that the system could handle complex document operations while maintaining strict security and compliance standards.

Intelligent Document Redaction & Processing

RedactXpert enables organizations to securely review and redact sensitive information within documents through a combination of automated search tools and manual redaction capabilities.

Key platform capabilities include:

• document rendering for PDF and Microsoft Office formats
• advanced document viewer with page thumbnails, zoom, rotate, and navigation tools
• multiple redaction modes including highlight, rectangle, and label-based redaction
• automated search across documents to identify sensitive terms
• bulk redaction across multiple pages
• label-based classification of redacted content

The system also provides auto-save and version control mechanisms, allowing users to safely manage edits and maintain an audit trail of document changes.

Workflow & Collaboration Management

The platform supports structured redaction workflows that allow multiple users to collaborate on document processing within a shared request.

Key workflow capabilities include:

• creation and lifecycle management of redaction requests (Draft -> In Progress -> Finalised)
• uploading and managing multiple documents within a single request
• shared custom labels and search terms across team members
• collaborative editing within a controlled tenant environment
• background processing to support document rendering and performance

These features allow investigation teams and legal reviewers to work collaboratively while maintaining strict control over document access and modification.

Security & Compliance

Given the sensitive nature of the documents being processed, the platform was designed with strong security and compliance mechanisms.

Key security features include:

• role-based access control (RBAC)
• tenant-based data isolation for organizations
• secure document storage and session management
• detailed audit logging tracking who redacted which information and when
• compliance with data protection and public-sector information governance standards

These mechanisms ensure that organizations can safely process sensitive documents while maintaining regulatory compliance.

Technology Stack

Platform Architecture

• SPA web application (Vue-based frontend)
• REST API backend architecture
• asynchronous background job processing
• document rendering engine for PDF and Office formats
• secure file storage and multi-tenant architecture

Infrastructure

• Microsoft Azure
• .NET backend services
• Azure SignalR
• OCR processing engines
• GdPicture libraries

Business Impact

Through the collaboration, NSC helped ensure the reliability, security, and performance of the RedactXpert platform.

The improved system enables Simpson Associates and its clients to:

• securely redact sensitive information from large document sets
• accelerate document review workflows for investigation and legal teams
• ensure compliance with GDPR and public-sector data protection requirements
• support collaborative document processing across multiple users

Today, RedactXpert supports organizations in handling sensitive documents more efficiently, enabling secure data sharing and compliant information governance across public sector environments.