Using stainless steel as the cold forged parts especially the outer parts of automobile is gradually increasing because it can bear up against the erosion and the wear. During cold forging of the stainless steel the working pressure acting on die surface are very high therefore the wear on die surface can be greatly increased. In cold forging processes, die failure must be considered before die design. One of the main reasons of die failure in industrial application of metal forming technologies is wear. The die wear affects the tolerances of forged parts, metal flow and costs of processes etc. The only way to to control these failures is to develop methods which allow prediction of the die wear and which are suited to be used in the desing stage in order to optimize the process. In this paper, the rigid-plastic finite element method was combined with the wear prediction routine and then the forward extrusion process using stainless steel was analysed simultaneously. To minimize the die wear the FPS algorithm was applied and the optimal conditions of die configuration are suggested.