This research is concerned with group scheduling problems in multi-stage manufacturing system with dependent setup time. The objective of the research is to develop and evaluate a heuristic algorithm for determining group sequence and job sequence within each group to minimize total tardiness in multi-stage manufacturing systems with sequence dependent group setup time. The group scheduling heuristic algorithm is developed and evaluated by comparisons with twenty-seven problems with the known optimum solutions and 144,000 random schedules of a large variety problems. The results indicate that the proposed heuristic algorithm gets the same optimum solutions for the problems and also provides the good solutions in comparison with the random schedules of the large variety problems. A numerical example is given to illustrate the heuristic algorithm.