Rename Material

We are selling a small part of our company and this division is migrating from SAP to Movex. Movex has a much shorter material number field so they'd like to rename the SAP materials in advance. Has anyone renamed active materials in SAP and if so, how was this accomplished? Copying a material seems to not work too well as additional data is necessary. BAPI to get data doesn't seem to easily map to bapi_material_savedata.

Any ideas?