The present disclosure provides a burner management system (BMS) for an industrial gas appliance and method for controlling a warm-up operation of the industrial gas appliance. The BMS and control method only requires a subset of the burners to be provided with flame detectors. In accordance with one aspect, the method involves lighting a supervised burner by providing a fuel gas flow thereto; continuously detecting a flame at the supervised burner indicating that the supervised burner is lit; incrementally lighting non-supervised burners by providing the fuel gas flow thereto when a non-supervised burner status indicates a safe lighting condition, the non-supervised burner status being determined by: measuring a total fuel gas flowing to the plurality of burners; and determining the number of the non-supervised burners with the fuel gas flowing thereto from the measurement of the total fuel gas and a supervised burner status.