One of the main issues of industrial product evolution planning is the current state of the art, related to the product itself, its market competitors, and also the available resources that can become parts of the future product. Moreover, to plan evolution, it is required to well understand how the performance of the product will be evaluated, on a future market, and surely it won’t be the same performance criteria as today habits.This issue has been tackled and defined as Analysis of Initial Situation. A combination of TRIZ based approaches and Design of Experiments has been defined to clarify the problem to be solved. But all these approaches are dedicated to analyze today product and to choose the prior problem to be considered, but these methods have not been defined to analyze long-term evolution planning of products.For this long-term planning, a method, FORMAT, has been developed and proposed. The purpose of this article is to describe the application of this methodology on an industrial case, to plan the evolution of kitchen hoods. The article will state the different methods to perform the Analysis of Initial Situation but also the benefits and the difficulties of FORMAT application.