The council has chosen outsourcer Capgemini as a preferred bidder to implement the Oracle ERP system across the council, with contract negotiations ongoing.
The £7 million fixed price contract will be delivered over the next 15 months, and includes implementing "hundreds of industry leading best practice business processes", said the council.
The council said the cost of the ERP system will be "offset" by £20 million in savings that will be generated by the system over the next five years, and the "potential" to generate income by taking on finance and human resources services for other public sector organisations.
The new business system is being deployed to streamline internal services at Cornwall such as finance, purchasing and human resources. The system will replace largely paper-based processes that Cornwall Council inherited from the old county and district councils.
It will provide a single integrated online system that will cut duplication, bureaucracy and costs, said the council. At the same time, the authority said it will introduce new and more efficient industry standard business processes to further streamline operations.
Michael Crich, Cornwall Council corporate director for resources, said, "At present we have staff across the organisation processing the same types of paperwork in different ways using the various systems that belonged to the old councils. Because many processes are manual, there can be double or even triple handling."
Crich said the new ERP system will "modernise processes, bring the council in line with other large councils across the country, and make it much more efficient".
Council leader Alec Robertson said, "We have an ambition to create a 'Big Cornwall' where public sector agencies work together to deliver efficiencies over and above those required by government."
He said the ERP system will mean "that in the longer term we could run finance and human resources services for other public sector partners in Cornwall or even public sector organisations further afield. There is scope to join up services locally and to bring income into the area".
In other ERP news, a pet foods company £39 million in compensation and damages through a court after claiming its ERP supplier misrepresented the capabilities of its software.
ERP buyer Sunshine Mills' award was about 260 times the cost of the original ERP licence.