Exclude "Assigned as" for alerts/notifications

Summary:

Is there a way in the alert filters to exclude? For example, in the "Assigned as" field if I chose MFG - Manufacturing Plants, can I set up the filters in such a way that anyone assigned by MFG - Manufacturing Plants would NOT receive an alert/notification?

We are struggling (to put it mildly) with notifications. Half of our business units wanting notifications to be sent and one business unit (with the largest population) does NOT want notifications to be sent because it causes too much confusion. In our old LMS were able to enable/disable notifications for each and every course, which was great. It's been shown that we can do this now with the new Self-Paced Learning, but we're not using that yet - that's a whole other topic!