Multi-Company Employee ID Assignment

Currently, our employees are captured in Lawson using different company codes for each country. For example, Company 11 = US, Company 12 = Canada.

Up until now, we manually assign a unique and sequential number to our employees. But, now Id like to leverage Lawson's 'Auto Employee' functionality so that we do not have to manually assign them.

Because each Company is considered a separate entity in Lawson, it allows the duplication of Employee numbers across Companies which we do not want.

The two options I have been considering are as follows:
1) Allow for duplicate employee numbers across countries but concatenate the Company code with the Employee Number as the 'new Employee ID'.
2) Auto number each Company using different starting points. For instance, Company 10 (US) starts at 10000. Company 11 (Canada) starts at 20000.

Id like to understand how others have handled this. Any additional options/suggestions would be great.

Regards,
Eric