The Brazilian public administration underwent a restructuring of its way of governing from the 1990s onwards. The managerial model was adopted in place of the bureaucratic model, given that the state was going through a serious economic, political and social crisis. With this in mind, the state of Minas Gerais decided to implement the Shared Services Centre, which centralises processes in a single unit and aims to reduce operating costs by standardising processes, increasing productivity and providing excellent services. With this in mind, the aim of this qualitative, descriptive study is to analyse how the Shared Services Centre was implemented, focusing on the purchasing processes of the State Secretariat for Social Defence and exploring the exceptions with regard to purchases that did not fall within the scope of the shared services project.