Change Control: OMW Promotions vs. Product Packaging

I am working on a project right now where change control is kind of a hot topic. The development E1 system is on a LAN and the production E1 system in on a private network at a remote location. There is T1 network redundancy and it is a fairly stable environment.

I am advised that all changes being promoted to production must be promoted and deployed thru product packaging.

All other things being equal - network stability, normal file share access, normal access to prod db's - are there some strong arguments as to why product packaging should have to be used to promote objects instead of just doing an OMW transfer?

I would be curious to know how many JDE customers (not vendors) use Product Packaging or Boomerang or the new save feature to promote to production. My experience has been that OMW is more stable and mainstream.

Our change control uses a combination of external (to JDE) documentation and approval process which includes risk analysis and testing, as well both OMW promotion and Boomerang.

The reason is that we have two separate installations one for production (one pathcode) and one for test/development (3 pathcodes). OMW promotion is used for the 3 pathcodes in the test/dev install, but of course it won't bridge the "gap" between the installations. The external documentation and approval process has to be approved before transfer from test/dev into prod. We used to use product packaging to move changes from the test/dev system to the prod system, but it was a convoluted and lengthy process. We now use Boomerang, which we find a lot better process.

Thanks Peter. I appreciate everyone's 2 cents.