Handling Higher Duties

We are currently implementing a Local Council in Australia. Higher duties is a business process usually seen in councils where an employee is temporarily promoted to a higher position and the current incumbent in that position is changed to a Suspended assignment status for that interim period. Now we are in a situation where the application is not able to support two specific scenarios:

#1 Automatic transfer of direct reports to the employee performing higher duties

When we are promoting the employee to a higher position the direct reports of the existing employee are not transferring to the new employee. Currently the HR needs to manually transfer the direct reports to the person performing higher duties.