Setup times and/or costs appear in a plethora of industrial and service applications. Sequence-dependent setup times and costs entail significantly complex Scheduling problems. In this paper, a new continuous time precedence-based mixed-integer linear programming scheduling framework is developed for dealing with sequence-dependent setup time and/or cost issues. This model is based on the unit-specific general precedence concept, which is introduced in this paper. Several case studies are carried out in order to highlight the efficiency and the special features of the proposed model. Comparisons were made with the existing precedence-based formulations. Medium-sized scheduling problems can be solved by the proposed framework with relatively low computational effort.