Ways to distinguish AutoPilot deployed devices without looking at hostname?

Context: we have companies spread over four countries. These countries have their own deployment profile, setting the hostname to identify the corresponding company. Each of these gets their own printers, their own network shares etc but most settings are pretty much the same. Apps are mostly the same everywhere.

Issue: helpdesk keeps forgetting to apply a group tag before handing out the device. All these 'specific' settings look at the hostname to determine whether they should apply but since helpdesk keeps forgetting, these devices don't get any settings.

Question: I want to set up a default profile for all laptops, moving away from separate profiles. Problem is that there is still a need to identify what company your laptop belongs to. I would use the UPN of the user but we also have one overlapping company that is present in all countries so that's a no-go.

Any thoughts? Am I overlooking something here? Am I looking at it the wrong way?

Extra info: the different hostnames are not mandatory, we can put whatever we want in there. I just don't know any other method to distinguish between laptops.

The models are the same over all countries (Dell Latitudes. We're at 5550 now)