Today one can find cold roll forming (CRF) products in many applications, for example vehicles, furniture and in the building industry. Though CRF is a well known sheet metal process, it is still not entirely understood due to the geometrically complex forming. There are several computer aided engineering (CAE) programs on the market that can assist the tool maker when designing a new CRF machine. However, they are often based on simple formulas when predicting the stress and the strain in the strip. The main objective of this study is to improve formulas for the longitudinal peak membrane strain and the deformation length when a U-channel is formed. These are important since they can be used to determine the number of forming steps and the distance between them. A twolevel factorial design is done using the finite element analysis to investigate which parameters affect the peak strain and the deformation length. The parameters are then used to build models for the peak strain and the deformation length.