Hello Tom
I would say that this must also reflect your physical/real company organisation.
One thing I am sure you understand is that. If you have 2 separate windchill server, then they are entirely independent. Which means you cannot share, view, reuse data nor share the processes. Partnumber could be the same but for different parts. The 2 Windchill servers will not communicate automatically or out of the box.
Generally speaking, from my point of view, it does not make sense to have 2 separate Windchill for the same company. There are always more things in common than expected. Unless you are 100k employee company, then maybe......
Now considering 1 organisation for all or 1 organisation per division. Here again it is a business decision. As for ERP, which has your organisation configured in it, PLM must also reflect your organisation. This is often what company fail to realize and Windchill ends up being used as a vault.
In my company we had 3 divisions when we started with Windchill but we thought that there were things in common and there will be more and more as we become more global. So we created 1 organisation to start with, also because we went live with one division first.
2 years later, 2 divisions merged into one !!!. Now we have 2 divisions but we now know that they do exchange more. One division take product from the other one to put into their product. Sales sale any product regardless of the division and also both division share in common bolts, nuts etc... At the moment those components are managed separately but we have a lot of duplication. Well each site has its own numbers for those items. We are standardizing all this. We will soon have a common library for everyone for those type of components.
This is made easy because we only have one organisation.
You need to know how much in common (data sharing, reuse, product development process (promotion, change management etc...) are in common between your divisions. Understand the limitation of Windchill. Can you share data accross division ? Maybe it is possible with PDMLink 10. What about OIR ? Can you have part number conflict (one site use ABC for a Component A but another site use 132 for the same component). How much can you standardize regardless of Windchill ?
It is not a light decision. Implementing PLM should go along with business transformation to ensure that the business is as efficient as it should be and PLM system used to its maximum capability
