Pan, Tin and Sheet Asset Tracking – Controlling the Metal That Shapes Your Product

This topic is part of the SG Systems Global regulatory & operations glossary.

Updated November 2025 •
Bakery Trolley Flow Control, Proofing Room Inventory Tracking, Flour Scaling & Silo Weighing, Minor & Micro Ingredient Stations, MES/eBR, CMMS, Traceability, Mass Balance
• Production, Engineering, QA, Maintenance, Planning, CI

Pan, tin and sheet asset tracking is the structured control of the reusable metalware that shapes and carries product through the bakery – strapped tins, loaf pans, bun and roll trays, baguette and tin bands, flat sheets, pizza screens and similar. It means knowing how many you own, where they are, what condition they’re in, which products they’re assigned to, how often they’re washed, recoated or repaired, and how they move between lines, proofers, ovens, coolers and storage.

Most bakeries quietly assume pans will “just be there”. Then one day a line stops for lack of tins, depanning goes bad, product sticks, scrap explodes, or an auditor rubs a finger along a rusty sheet and starts asking awkward questions about food‑contact surfaces. Pan, tin and sheet tracking is about treating those assets as part of the validated process, not as anonymous lumps of metal that somehow never show up in any system.

“You can’t claim a ‘controlled baking process’ if you have no idea how many pans you have, where they are, or what state they’re in.”

1) What We Mean by Pan, Tin and Sheet Assets

In an industrial bakery, “pans, tins and sheets” are not generic items – they are core process assets:

• Strapped tins and pan sets: Multiple loaf tins, roll cups or moulds fixed to a frame that runs through make‑up, proof and bake.
• Single pans and tins: Individual bread, cake or speciality tins used in modular carriers or on conveyors.
• Flat sheets and trays: For cookies, pastries, croissants, pizza bases and flatbreads – sometimes perforated, sometimes solid.
• Specialty forms: Baguette trays, bun/roll trays, burger bun moulds, sandwich tin lids, focaccia trays, cake rings and more.
• Carriers and racks: The frames, belts or trolleys that hold pan sets as they move through the line.

Asset tracking in this context means treating those items like you would treat a critical pump or oven zone: numbered, recorded, inspected, maintained and planned. At minimum, you should know:

• How many pans, tins and sheets you own per type and line.
• Where they are (line, washer, repair, storage, external coater, scrap).
• Which product families they’re approved for (allergen, claim, size and pattern).
• What their condition is (good, worn, damaged, due for recoating or replacement).

If your answer to any of those is “roughly”, you’re not tracking assets – you’re guessing and hoping the metal will keep forgiving you.

2) Why Pan and Tin Tracking Matters

Ignoring pan, tin and sheet management hits you in four places at once:

• Product quality and brand: Bent or warped tins, worn coatings and mixed pan types drive inconsistent volume, shape, crust colour and depanning damage. Customers see that on shelf long before they ever see your SOPs.
• Yield and cost: Sticking, “pan marks”, crushed edges and tear‑outs during depanning turn good dough into scrap, rework or rejects. Poor pan balance also causes starvation or stop‑start running that kills OEE.
• Food safety and compliance: Pans are food‑contact surfaces. Rusty, flaking, oil‑soaked or poorly cleaned pans are an obvious hazard. Poor control of allergen‑dedicated pan fleets can shred your labels and your HACCP story.
• Capex and working capital: Pan fleets are expensive. Losing them, abusing them or over‑buying “just in case” ties up capital and drives unnecessary recoating and replacement spend.

It’s fashionable to obsess over mixers and ovens while treating pans as background hardware. In reality, pans are the last thing your dough touches before it becomes product. If you don’t manage them, you’ve decided to leave a big chunk of your process to luck.

3) The Pan Fleet – Types, Families and Flows

Every site has a “fleet” of pans, tins and sheets – usually more complex than people admit. Typical dimensions of that fleet:

• By product family: Sandwich loaves, bloomers, rolls, burger buns, baguettes, cakes, cookies, pastries, pizza, flatbreads – each with its own tooling.
• By line: High‑speed plant bread vs artisan line vs roll lines; some fleets are line‑dedicated, others shared with all the chaos that implies.
• By coating or surface: Bare steel, aluminised steel, Teflon or PTFE coatings, silicone, oil‑seasoned surfaces; different coatings have different life and cleaning needs.
• By condition: New, in normal use, end‑of‑life, damaged, temporarily repaired, awaiting recoating or scrapping.
• By ownership: Some pans are owned outright; others are leased, managed by third‑party pan companies or included in product tolling contracts.

Flow‑wise, pans circulate continuously: storage → make‑up loading → proofing (racks or conveyors) → ovens → cooling → depanning → pan cooling → inspection/wiping → washer or oiling → storage or direct return to line. In stronger operations, that flow is standardised and visible. In weaker ones, pans disappear into side rooms, “temporary” stacks and ad‑hoc repair zones that nobody tracks.

4) The Data Model – IDs, Sets, States and Cycles

You don’t have to engrave a serial number on every single loaf tin, but you do need a usable data model. Common patterns include:

• Pan set IDs: Each strapped set or tray gets an ID (barcode, 2D code, RFID tag or etched code). That ID is the unit of tracking for usage, cleaning and maintenance.
• Family and spec: The ID links to a master record that defines dimensions, cavity count, coating type, OEM, product family and approved lines.
• State: In production, in washer, in storage, at external coater, under repair, quarantined, scrapped. States should be explicit in MES or CMMS, not just “somewhere in the plant”.
• Lifecycle counters: Cycles or oven passes since new or since last recoating; number of washes; number of recorded repairs; visual inspection grades.
• Ownership and location: Where the set belongs and where it physically is – line, rack zone, warehouse, off‑site, scrap area.

At a minimum you need counts and locations by fleet and line; at a more advanced level, you track sets individually and can pull out the worst performers for repair or recoating. Either way, the days when “we think we’ve got enough tins” counted as a plan should be over.

5) Physical Flow and Layout – Where Pans Actually Live

Pan tracking only works if the physical flow isn’t utter chaos. Typical choke points:

• Pan storage areas: Racks or zones where clean pans wait for loading. These need capacity limits, zoning by product family and clear signage.
• Line in‑feed: Where pans are loaded with dough pieces – either automatically or manually. Poorly organised in‑feeds create mixed pan types and wrong product/pan pairing.
• Proofing and baking: Pans travel on trolleys, belts or carriers through proofers and ovens. If you don’t know which pans are on which carriers, you’re blind to what product experienced which pan condition.
• Depanning and pan return: The return path to pan storage or washers often crosses with other flows – a prime place for pans to be lost, damaged or mis‑segregated.
• Washing and oiling: Washer and oiler capacity, layout and queue management heavily influence pan condition and turn‑round time.

Well‑designed sites treat pans like a closed loop with defined routes and WIP limits, just like dough or trolleys. Weak sites rely on operators “finding some trays” in whatever corner looks least full. When pans wander, your control of line balance, proof times and product quality wanders with them.

6) Condition, Coatings and Release Performance

Pans and tins don’t fail overnight; they slide down a curve of “good enough” until sticking and scrap force someone to pay attention. Key elements of condition management:

• Mechanical condition: Warping, bent corners, cracked welds, missing or distorted cups, deformed tray edges that snag conveyors or depanners.
• Surface condition: Wear of non‑stick coatings, scratches, pitting, rust spots, baked‑on carbon or oil; all of these affect release and hygiene.
• Release performance data: Linking sticking, tear‑outs and depanning damage reports back to specific pan sets or fleets, not treating them as generic “line issues”.
• Coating and recoating cycles: Planned recoating based on oven passes or visual grades, tracked in CMMS and aligned with supplier capabilities.
• Holding limits: Rules for when a pan is quarantined – for example, visible rust or flaking, coating delamination or structural cracks.

If the only time you retire pans is when they literally fall apart in the oven, you’re paying for it every day in sticking, variable bake, ugly product and extended depanning downtime. Coating and condition programmes look expensive until you cost the scrap they prevent.

7) Cleaning, Hygiene and Allergen Segregation

Pans, tins and sheets are food‑contact surfaces and potential allergen carriers. Asset tracking must connect to cleaning and hygiene rules:

• Pan washers and cleaning SOPs: Defined cleaning methods and frequencies per product/coating, with verification that pans actually go through the cycle – not just “we wash them when they look bad”.
• Visual standards: Clear criteria for acceptable residual build‑up vs “must rewash or refurbish”; pan inspection as a routine, not a panic when auditors visit.
• Allergen‑dedicated fleets: For products with nuts, cheese, seeds, chocolate or other sticky allergens, dedicated pans may be required. Those fleets must be tracked, zoned and not casually “borrowed” for allergen‑free SKUs.
• Claim and religious segregation: Gluten‑free, vegan, kosher or halal lines may require dedicated pans or validated cleaning. Asset tracking proves what touched what.
• Dry vs wet cleaning: Some pans can’t go through wet washers without killing coatings; tracking which sets require which cleaning method prevents well‑meaning operators from destroying expensive assets.

When an auditor or customer asks, “How do you ensure pans used for allergen SKU X aren’t used on allergen‑free SKU Y?”, “we usually keep them separate” is not an answer. Dedicated, identified fleets and recorded cleaning are.

8) Balancing, WIP and Line Capacity

Pans are also WIP carriers. Too few, and the line starves; too many, and you clog floors and washers. Asset tracking helps you answer basic but critical questions:

• How many pans does this line really need? Enough for the full circuit – make‑up, proof, oven, cooling, return, washing and buffer – at the planned speed, plus a sensible contingency.
• Where is the constraint? Proofers, ovens, washers and coolers all contribute to the pan count. Under‑sized washers or long recoating cycles silently steal usable pans from production.
• What’s in use vs idle? Analytics on how many pans are in each state: loaded, in process, waiting to be washed, sitting in storage. Many sites own far more pans than they can actually use because they don’t realise how many are tied up off‑line.
• Changeovers and campaigns: Different SKUs may need different pan tooling. Pan asset tracking supports campaign planning and minimises changeover chaos.

Plant‑bread lines running short of tins in the middle of a promotion aren’t suffering from bad luck; they’re suffering from the absence of pan‑fleet planning. You wouldn’t spec a line without calculating mixer or oven capacity; doing that for pans is the same discipline extended to the hardware that actually holds the dough.

9) Integration with MES, eBR, WMS and CMMS

Modern bakeries increasingly pull pans into their digital backbone alongside ingredients and equipment:

• MES/eBR integration: Pan set IDs scanned as they enter lines or certain zones, recorded against batches in the electronic batch record – especially for high‑risk or high‑value products.
• WMS and pan storage: Pan storage areas treated as managed locations; movements between warehouse, line and external re‑coaters recorded just like pallets.
• CMMS integration: Coating cycles, repairs, inspections and failures captured as maintenance jobs; life‑to‑date data used to refine recoating intervals and budget forecasts.
• Counting and reconciliation: Periodic pan counts (per fleet and type) reconciled, with losses investigated rather than simply written off.
• Data lakes & analytics: Combining pan IDs, batch results and scrap data to see which pan fleets drive the highest defect rates or downtime.

You don’t need aerospace‑grade RFID on every tin to start; even treating pan fleets as counted assets in WMS/CMMS, with simple zone control and maintenance records, is a big step up from “we buy more when it feels like we’re running short”. As complexity and scale grow, more granular tracking quickly pays for itself in reduced scrap and lost assets.

10) Impact on Yield, Scrap and Mass Balance

Pans and sheets show up in the numbers whether you look for them or not:

• Sticking and depanning scrap: Poor coatings and damaged tins generate scrap loaves, broken rolls, torn pastries and off‑weights. That rolls straight into yield variance and mass‑balance gaps.
• Under‑fill and over‑fill: Bent tins and warped trays alter effective volume and heat transfer, driving inconsistent weights and bake – and more rework.
• Crumb and oil build‑up: Excess build‑up affects heat profiles and release, adds unpredictable weight loss, and often shows up as “mysterious” crust defects and dark spots.
• Downtime and short runs: Missing pans, clogged washers and mixed fleets force slow running, short stops and partial loads that waste both product and time.
• Invisible loss: Pans physically lost, scrapped informally or left at third‑party coaters for months tie up capital and drive reactive purchases.

When you run a serious batch variance investigation for chronic low yield on a line, pan condition and availability often sit right alongside dough absorption, dough temperature and oven settings as root‑cause candidates. If your investigation template doesn’t ask about pans, it’s incomplete.

11) Common Failure Modes and Audit Findings

Signs that pan and tin asset control is flaky are painfully obvious:

• Mixed pan fleets on the same line: Different tin sizes, shapes or coatings for supposedly identical products; “we use whatever’s clean”.
• Rust and flaking surfaces: Auditor touches a pan and comes away with rust or coating flakes; “we’re planning to change those” is not reassuring.
• Pan graveyards: Corners full of damaged or half‑usable pans nobody has formally scrapped or repaired; no one can say how long they’ve been there.
• Lost pans and “ghost assets”: System thinks you have 3,000 tins; the floor can only show 2,300; everyone shrugs and blames “historic losses”.
• Allergen cross‑use: Same trays used for seeded and non‑seeded breads, cheese‑topped and “plain” SKUs, without documented control or validated cleaning.
• No maintenance records: Recoating, repair and replacement based on panic decisions; no logs in CMMS; no cost visibility.

Regulators and major customers don’t need niche knowledge to read this. Pans and tins are low‑hanging fruit: if you can’t keep the main food‑contact surfaces of your process in decent condition and under control, they’ll question everything else you claim about your QMS, CPV and risk management.

12) Technology Options – IDs, RFID and Pan Management Systems

There’s a spectrum of solutions between “no control” and fully automated pan management:

• Basic visual IDs: Stamped or etched alphanumeric codes on pan sets, used mainly for inspection and repair logging.
• Barcodes and 2D codes: Labels or metal tags that can survive washers and ovens to some degree, scanned at key points (line in‑feed, washer, repair).
• RFID tags: Embedded or attached tags read by fixed gates as pan sets move around; powerful for high‑volume lines but require careful design to survive heat and chemicals.
• Specialist pan‑tracking software: Dedicated systems (often from pan suppliers) that manage fleets, recoating schedules, movements and condition scoring, integrated with MES/CMMS.
• Analytics overlays: Even without individual IDs, you can track pan fleets as “soft assets” and correlate scrap, downtime and maintenance events with pan‑related activities.

The right level depends on your scale, product mix and risk appetite. The wrong level is nothing – trusting that pans will keep showing up in good condition without anyone watching doesn’t survive first contact with reality, let alone an audit or a serious yield review.

13) Designing a Pan, Tin and Sheet Asset Tracking Framework

Implementing pan asset tracking takes more than engraving a few numbers. A pragmatic framework usually includes:

• Fleet census: Count pans, tins and sheets by type, line and condition; reconcile to purchase and recoating records; identify obvious gaps and graveyards.
• Segmentation: Group assets into fleets by product family, allergen and line; decide which fleets are shared and which are dedicated.
• ID strategy: Choose the identification level (fleet, set, individual) and technology (visual codes, barcodes, RFID) appropriate for your risk and budget.
• Flow mapping: Map how pans should move through production, washers, storage and maintenance; define WIP limits and no‑parking zones; align with trolley flow and proofing inventory.
• Cleaning and condition SOPs: Frequency, methods, inspection criteria and hold/scrap triggers per pan type and coating.
• System integration: Configure CMMS for pan maintenance, update WMS locations and, where justified, extend MES/eBR to log pan usage for selected products.
• KPIs and governance: Track pan losses, recoating cost, pan‑related scrap and downtime, inspection failures and audit comments; review regularly alongside other line KPIs.

The initial census and clean‑up are usually sobering – fleets are smaller, older and more damaged than anyone thought. That’s the point. You can’t improve what you won’t measure, and pans don’t fix themselves while you look the other way.

14) How Pan Asset Tracking Fits Across the Value Chain

R&D and NPI: When designing new SKUs, pan and tray selection is part of the product spec – size, shape, cavity count, coating, heat transfer. Asset tracking ensures those specs actually show up on the line and stay consistent across sites.

Procurement and pan suppliers: Fleet data feeds sourcing decisions – which pan types and coatings deliver best life and release, which suppliers cause the least downtime, when you need to budget for new tools or recoating campaigns.

Planning and S&OP: Pan fleets are capacity constraints just like mixers and ovens. Seasonal peaks, promotions and new launches that ignore pan availability and recoating cycles will hit the wall in production, not on a spreadsheet.

Production and CI: Pan‑related scrap, depanning stoppages and slow ramp‑ups are rich improvement targets. Tracking assets lets CI teams quantify and fix issues instead of blaming “bad dough” for problems caused by bad metal.

Quality, food safety and brand: Retailers and foodservice customers increasingly ask how you control food‑contact surfaces and allergen segregation. A visible, data‑backed pan management programme is a strong part of that story; a pile of rusty tins in a side room is the opposite.

Multi‑site and co‑manufacturing networks: Shared SKUs produced on different lines and sites depend on comparable pans to deliver consistent look and weight. Asset tracking across a network reveals where tooling differences quietly erode brand consistency.

In short, pans, tins and sheets are not an annoying detail for the maintenance team. They’re part of your process design, your food‑safety risk profile and your cost base. Treat them accordingly or accept that some share of your problems will always be coming from metal you don’t really manage.

15) FAQ

Q1. Do we really need unique IDs on every pan set, or is fleet‑level control enough?
It depends on your scale and risk. For smaller lines with simple fleets, controlling at the level of “Line 1 bread tins vs Line 2 trays” can be enough if you keep counts, condition inspections and clear segregation. As lines, products and allergen demands grow, set‑level IDs become more attractive because they let you target the worst performers for repair or recoating and prove which fleets were used on which products. What doesn’t work is no identification at all beyond “that stack over there”.

Q2. How many pans or tins should a line have?
Enough to cover the full mechanical loop – from make‑up through proof, oven, cooling and depanning back to the washer and storage – at your maximum realistic speed, plus a defined buffer for breakdowns and cleaning. You calculate it from conveyor length, index pitch, proof and bake times, washer cycle time and planned downtime, not from “what we’ve always had”. Pan‑fleet sizing should be as deliberate as sizing mixers or ovens; if lines are regularly short of tins, nobody has done that homework.

Q3. Should pan management sit with maintenance, operations or QA?
All three. Maintenance typically owns condition, repairs and recoating planning; operations owns day‑to‑day pan flow, segregation and correct usage by product; QA owns hygiene, allergen zoning and accept/reject criteria for pan surfaces. If any one of them treats pans as “someone else’s problem”, gaps open up fast. The key is clear responsibility boundaries and shared KPIs, not trying to dump everything on one function.

Q4. How often should pans be inspected or recoated?
There’s no one‑size answer. Frequency depends on product type, oven profile, coating, cleaning method and line speed. Practically, you start with OEM or coater guidance (for example, X thousand oven passes for a given coating), then refine based on your own condition scoring and scrap data. If you’re recoating only when sticking becomes a crisis, you’re too late; if you’re recoating on a calendar without looking at real condition, you’re probably wasting money. Asset tracking plus simple inspection regimes let you find the sweet spot.

Q5. What quick wins exist before we invest in RFID or specialist software?
You can get real benefits with low‑tech steps: do a fleet census and scrap obviously dead pans; segregate fleets clearly by product and allergen; standardise visual IDs and simple inspection tags; define basic cleaning and inspection frequencies; ban ad‑hoc mixing of pan types on the same product; and start logging pan‑related scrap and stoppages explicitly. Once you’ve proved how much pan issues cost you, it becomes much easier to justify scanners, CMMS integration or external pan‑management services.

Related Reading
• Flow & WIP Control: Bakery Trolley Flow Control | Proofing Room Inventory Tracking | Dough Ball Freezer Inventory Management
• Equipment, Maintenance & Hygiene: CMMS | HACCP | QMS | Cleaning Validation (if applicable)
• Data, Yield & Traceability: MES | eBR | Traceability | Mass Balance | Yield Variance | Batch Variance Investigation | GxP Data Lake & Analytics