Roll form designers gain experience in roll form tooling design for certain kind of profiles. When a new profile has to be designed, usually a similar successfully produced profile from a previous project is utilized. The flower pattern and the roll tooling are modified in accordance with the new profile form.

The roll form design software automates this procedure extensively. First, a development table (Pict. 2) is created from the existing design project (Pict. 1). This table represents the flower pattern scheme and contains the bending angles and the bending methods. If necessary, the table can be edited and modified or can be created manually. In order to use the table for a new profile with different angles the table angles are converted to percentages related to the final angle. After adding any comments the development table can be saved, thus a company-specific knowledge base for different kinds of profiles is created that increases with every successful design.

When a new profile has to be designed, the designer simply opens the appropriate development table and applies it to the new profile, thus the flower pattern for all passes is created automatically (Pict. 3). The crucial point is that not a software based algorithm is used (this would not been accepted by the designers). By applying the development table the company-specific know-how about this kind of profile is used instead.

The results can be verified and checked using the quality management tools: the stress of band edge calculation, the profile stress analysis (PSA) ore: and the "Virtual Roll Forming Machine" that simulates the roll forming process by FEA (Finite Element Analysis).