Cold Roll Forming (CRF) is one of the most productive processes for manufacturing thin-walled products with constant cross section. It consists in a continuous bending operation of a long metal sheet. The sheet is gradually formed through pairs of rotating rolls (called stations) until the desired cross-sectional configuration is obtained. The CRF process is widely used in aerospace, construction, automotive and other industries with large production volumes. Roll-forming processes gained high interest in the industry to form High and Ultra-High Strength Steels (HSS & HSS and UHSS). These steel grades permit to pursue advanced structural optimization and to achieve lighter design solutions. The extensive application of roll forming can be due to its increased deformation capability and the limitations of UHSS when formed through traditional stamping processes. However, CRF remains a complex process and it is affected by different problems, such as wave, torsion, twist or bow defects and elastic spring back. Finite Element Analysis (FEA) is employed at the industrial level as an efficient and economical tool to examine the process. The aim of the project is to create a FE methodology able to give fast and reliable results about the state variables inside part throughout the cold roll-forming process of steel profiles. To meet the requirements of the industry, the model is designed to be efficiently set-up and computed in a short time. The outcome of this analysis will be employed to predict the occurrence of defects due to unbalanced spring-back or excessive longitudinal strain, which is a crucial factor in the quality evaluation of rolls design and to initialize the stress and strain state on existing FE models of parts produced through roll forming. The implementation of effects due to manufacturing is expected to improve the accuracy of structural analysis on final products, which are nowadays studied assuming a zero strain and stress field at the beginning of the analysis. In the first part of the study an implicit FE model is created to simulate the cold roll-forming process of a U-shaped steel profile requiring 9 forming stations. Since the simulation of a steady-state process of the sheet uncoiling and passing through the rolls would requires a great amount of computational power and time, to decrease the process lead time only a small portion of the metal sheet is modelled. This is possible via particular boundary conditions which are introduced to simulate the blank continuity in the roll-forming direction. The numerical model output and its assumptions are compared to experimental tests. Strain gauges and 3D scan are employed to study the complex strain field and kinematics of the process. Longitudinal strain, sheet geometry inside the CRF line and cross-section after spring-back are employed to correlate the FE model results to experimental data. The analysis results show a good correlation within a competitive lead time for industrial applications. Then, the outcomes from these simulations are applied to a real case study to better understand the effects of the manufacturing process on the performance of the final product.