Xenmark started from a fairly simple frustration: drawing reviews are often harder to manage than they need to be.
After years of working with drawing revisions as engineers, the same problems kept coming up. Comments arrived through different channels, so nobody could say with confidence that the list was complete. Feedback was unclear, and asking what was meant started another thread that ended up somewhere other than the comment it belonged to. Drawing versions went stale, so comments had to be matched back to the right revision by hand. And by the time a review closed, the record of what was raised, answered, and agreed was spread across emails, PDFs, and folders, and nobody in particular owned the job of pulling it together.
What we wanted instead
Keep the drawing, comments, replies, and revision history in one place, without requiring an expensive or overly complicated document management system.
In the product that place is the Review Panel — every comment in a project with its replies and its status. We wanted the comment itself to be the thing people worked around, rather than a marker on one PDF or an email thread about it. A comment can have several markers on the drawing, but it stays one item with one number.
The review has to end in something useful
Collecting comments is only part of the job. At some point the review has to go back to the engineering firm in a form they can actually work with, and that part is usually rebuilt by hand — someone reads through the markups and retypes them into a spreadsheet.
So the output matters as much as the review. Xenmark exports two documents: a PDF showing where each numbered comment sits on the drawing, and an Excel list carrying what each comment says, with its status and replies. The numbering is the same in both. The working review becomes the deliverable, rather than the raw material for one.
Revisions are part of the same problem. You receive Rev B while two comments against Rev A are still open — one of them is what caused Rev B in the first place, the other hasn’t been dealt with yet. If each uploaded PDF is treated as a separate document, that connection is gone. Xenmark keeps comments tied to the revision they were raised against, so you can still see what happened and why.
We didn’t want another system everyone had to buy
A drawing review usually crosses company boundaries. An owner starts it, colleagues comment, a consultant joins partway through, and an engineering firm replies.
If every one of those people has to buy a licence first, you’ve created a barrier before anyone has even opened the drawing — and in practice it means the review happens by email instead. So Xenmark separates running a project from taking part in one. The person running the project needs a plan; the people invited into it don’t, and they’re not charged per seat.
Xenmark also isn’t CAD software, and it isn’t a permanent document archive. Drawings come out of CAD, the review happens here, and the deliverables go into whatever document system you already keep records in. When a project closes, the full archive bundle can be downloaded and kept on your side. That’s what makes it focused enough to hand to an external reviewer without training them first.
Keeping it cheap to run was part of the same thinking — we wrote separately about why Xenmark is cheap to run and how that shapes the free plan.
What this blog is for
This is where we’ll share what we’re building, what we’ve learned along the way, and some practical thoughts on drawing reviews, engineering workflows, and technical documentation.