Assigning existing materials to updated model

[Anonymous]

I am a fairly new user of 3ds max so forgive my ignorance on the subject but I cant seem to figure out a quick way of doing this.

I work in archvis and thus I render projects as they develop. Often times I will have all my materials for a given scene worked out and assigned correctly to the model(s) in the scene. Now, often in architecture things change on the project. So changes happen, and I must reimport the updated model. However, when I do this, every time I have to reassign all my vray materials to the geometry. 

Is there a way in which I can simply have the software automatically do this repetitive and time consuming task? I used to work in Rhino and what I would do is assign the materials by layer, so as long as the layers of the model dont change, the material assignments wont change. Is there a way I can do this similarly in 3dsmax?