The state of Georgia is rethinking how it buys things.

For decades, the state relied on people called order-takers to handle purchases. When a purchase request arrived from a state agency, the order-taker posted it for the public to read. Soon, proposals would arrive, and after opening all bids in public, the order-takers chose the bid with the lowest price.

They considered few details surrounding the initial purchase request.

“They didn’t read it, they didn’t look at it, they didn’t analyze it,” said Brad Douglas, commissioner for Georgia’s Department of Administrative Services, which is leading the change in thinking. “That price had no bearing on what the price could have been or should have been.”

Georgia’s buying process lacked strategy and information. The result was a procurement system from the Dark Ages. It left officials with no insight on who was buying what or from whom. But a revolution has been happening in the Peach State’s procurement programs over the past three years. Officials are pushing order-takers to be strategists when buying, rather than simply awarding based on price alone.

“Purchasing has always been the place that people went to when an organization didn’t know what else to do with them,” Douglas said. But during recent economic declines, officials noticed that smart acquisition adds to the bottom line. “That’s when I think you saw purchasing as a profession change its colors.”

In 2003, when Republican Gov. Sonny Perdue took office, he urged agency officials to think differently about how they operated. He wanted them to run their organizations like businesses — to know where their money goes and find ways to save it.

In an interview with CIO Magazine in 2007, Perdue said the primary business principle he wanted to bring to Georgia was fact-based decision-making.