North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) codes are a system developed by the federal Office of Management and Budget to identify and classify industries into groups with the same processes to produce goods and services. The codes are used to provide uniformity and consistency in the collection and analysis of data. Every business and industry is assigned to a class.
Business and marketing databases often have a search field based on the NAICS classification code. The advantage of searching with the code is the ability to retrieve information about all of the industries or businesses that are identified with the same code.