[claus]

For industrial design I constantly import similar versions of the same product and endlessly assign the same materials.

Keyshot has a great feature called "material templates". If you apply the template at the time of import, any object that was assigned a material or color in the modelling application will automatically get a Keyshot material of the same name (so the color "aluminum" becomes the material "aluminum"). The templates can also be applied based on object names in stead of color.