<p>In order to improve the service life by reducing damages of the forming tool, forming tools have been conventionally made from expensive tool steels with high strength and hardness. Because the damage of the tool occurs in local regions, it is uneconomical to fabricate the entire forming tool with costly tool steels. The objective of this research work is to investigate manufacture of hardfaced forming tools on the structural steel with relatively low cost using a laser engineered net shaping (LENS) process. Hardfaced specimens and forming tools are created by the deposition of Inconel 718 super-alloy powders on AISI 1045 structural steel using the LENS process. The effects of the substrate design on the formation of the deposited region and the residual stress in the vicinity of the deposited region are examined via experiments. A proper model for thermo-mechanical analyses is obtained through a comparison of the results of experiments and those of analyses. The influence of the substrate design on the residual stress distributions in the vicinity of the hardfaced region is investigated to predict an appropriate depth for the post-processing via thermo-mechanical analyses. Several hardfaced forming tools are fabricated from the LENS process. From the results of the investigation, the post-processing depth is determined to be 1.0&#xa0;mm. Two types of forming tools are successfully fabricated by the hardfacing technology. In addition, it is shown that cost efficiencies of hardfaced tools increases when the ratio of the hardfaced volume to the substrate volume decreases.</p>