Variant Configurator and ALE

Has anyone had any experience with using ALE to transport all aspects of the Variant Configurator set-up to another SAP instance? We had planned to go this route, but have had people tell us that they wrote custom programs to download data from one instance and then use BDC's to load them in the new system. Is there a problem with using ALE for VC set-up data or anything we should be aware off?

Regards.