Office Depot has achieved $5.3 million in energy savings over two and a half years — an average annual savings of $2.2 million —  with Phoenix Energy Technologies energy management software and services, according to the companies.

The national retailer has also seen an average annual reduction of about 20,572 MWh, a 61 percent return on investment and a 12-month payback period, the companies say.

According to PhoenixET, in May 2012 when the enterprise energy management company first approached Office Depot, the retailer was manually monitoring its 1,100 locations and struggling to manage its EMS system.

Office Deport first implemented PhoenixET’s enterprize energy management software platform, EnterpriseDX, which accessed, consolidated and validated more than 300,000 data points in less than six weeks without new hardware or a single site visit.

Office Depot then worked with PhoenixET’s analytics team who identified energy outliers and system inefficiencies. The team created baselines, benchmarks and diagnostic tools to deliver energy savings for Office Depot before the EMS monitoring team implemented the energy-savings initiatives.

The monitoring team also remotely changed setpoints and schedules for Office Depot as needed, and trouble shot issues to save on dispatching technicians when possible. If Office Depot did need to call in a technician, EMS tracked these visits, walking the technician through repairs and validating that they repairs had been completed.

A March 2012 Groom Energy report named PhoenixET as one of 10 enterprise smart grid vendors to watch because of their innovation, customer proof points, market momentum, product development and increased emphasis on enterprise-wide and multiple-site implementations. The other nine companies in the report are C3, CA Technologies, Ecova, EnergyCAP, EnerNOC, Lucid, Schneider Electric, SCIenergy and Siemens.