Mass Update of Employee Assignments - Changing Grade

We are on EBS 12.1.3 and have a long manual process for implementing new grade ladder changes when the unions negotiate pay rate increases.  One issue this time is that staff need to change a bunch of employees to new grades.  The current process is to update the grade ladder through the Total Compensation Wizard and then staff have to manually update each Position and Employee Assignment to associate the correct new grade to each.  This is a lot of manual work.

Someone mentioned the Mass Update of Employee Assignments function, so we tried that out.  We can query for the proper assignments to change, but when we input the new Grade to assign, the process does update the Grade but it also resets the Grade Step Placement Point to the lowest Point for that Grade.  Our rules are such that the employee would stay at the same Point he was at, but just the Grade should change.