Material processing plays a vital role in fabrication of appliances and components of specific properties by selecting a right kind of material. In today's context, the widely used structural steels must have properties of high strength and environmental corrosion resistance to overcome the limitations of iron-carbon plane steels, which show pitting resistance of zero equivalent number (PREN). Therefore, towards overcoming the limitations and enhancing the strength, various notch wavy rolling techniques were developed for environmental friendly austenitic stainless steel (ASS) sheets, especially, for thin sections to have light weight. The ASS material shows good corrosion resistance (PREN > 18 for AISI 304 SS) but it also shows low yield strength and high ductility after solution annealing treatment. Furthermore, it has a drawback of undergoing phase transformation from austenite (fcc-crystalline structure) to martensite (bcc/bct) when subjected to large plastic deformation at ambient temperature. By applying the notch wavy rolling techniques, the yield strength of such 304 ASS material can be increased from 300 MPa to 750 MPa, along with the optimized ductility ranging from 52% to 25%, respectively. These are considered to be very important and favorable properties for advanced structural applications. Strain hardening ratio after the process was also determined. The microstructural changes responsible for such improvements in properties of the processed material were studied using optical microscopy and AFM techniques. © 2018 Elsevier Ltd.